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Comments: 202 +- Technology: The Battle Between Google and Facebook on Saturday June 27 2009, @09:52AM
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A story at Wired delves into the ongoing struggle between Google and Facebook to establish their competing visions for the future of the internet. "For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms — rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this 'social graph' to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire — rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now." A related article at ReadWriteWeb suggests that while Facebook's member base is enormous, the company hasn't taken advantage of its influence as well as it should have, though the capability for it to do so still exists.
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Why not have both? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why not have both? (Score:5, Insightful)
My "vision" for the future of the Internet:
One where there is room for Zuckerberg version, Google's, Microsofts and Richard Stallmans. And anyone else who wants to put something up for consideration.
As long as we have network neutrality, all of these visionaries are free to do as they please.
This "one version will overtake all the rest" mentality is a meat-space concept and has no place on the Internet.
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Google Wave and room for multiple visions (Score:3, Interesting)
antimatter in the mix (Score:5, Interesting)
Google appears to be the one company in this mix that seems to subscribe to the notion that a rising tide floats all boats. Look at what they are doing with Google Wave [google.com] as a fascinating example (innovative, open standards based, open source implementation).
Microsoft's world domination by operating system monopoly is over, they are a dead man walking.
FaceBook will integrate with Google Wave, or they will become irrelevant.
Blog engine makers will have an opportunity to see blogs on an equal footing with FaceBook, by integrating with Google Wave. Bloggers will have a chance to spark a conversation through their social network, as with FaceBook, but they will also have the chance to have that conversation grow beyond their circle of friends, as with a high profile blog today. As a participant in those conversations, your contribution today is normally "fire and forget" (I always wonder why people bother posting to the comments area of the major newspapers, where there comment is read only by them and one or two lunatics with an axe to grind). Tomorrow, with Google Wave, you can participate in conversations all over the internet, without the need to remember to go back to hundreds of places to check to see if anyone else was interested in what you said.
If they (or someone else) figure out how to build a decent set of filters and ratings into it, Google Wave might make Digg irrelevant.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks but no thanks...
Re:Why not have both? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I would consider Stallman an "inclusionary." He has fought hardest and loudest to ensure that users - who normally have no say whatsoever in how the software they use works, will have the choice to use "something else" if that's what they want. And the beauty of it is, you are free to choose to use Microsoft's offering instead.
It's kind of the same thing as net neutrality. It's all about having choices. And that scares some people who's world view won't allow them to see a market place of ideas in terms of anything but "winner takes it all."
I'm sorry you feel so oppressed by the bearded one, but don't worry. Last time I checked there was plenty of opportunity for you to stay inside the silo and continue to be locked in by vendors like Microsoft. I honestly don't think that's going to change any time soon.
I'm just glad that my choice isn't limited to you narrow vision.
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Re:Why not have both? (Score:5, Insightful)
Precisely. My friends may be good at recommending a pub that I would like. But I don't think my network of friends would be particularly trustworthy for recommending with digital SLR to buy.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why not have both? (Score:5, Insightful)
And besides, Google is already making forays into just this sort of thing with Wave. Holy false dichotomy, batman.
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Re:Why not have both? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I saw it on the Tonight Show, the coming Facebook-Google-Twitter mashup will be called YouTwitFace.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with Zuckerberg's vision is that it only works when you have a sufficient number of friends who share your interests. When people don't organize themselves into mailing lists, forums, newsgroups, etc., but only have social connections, you end up having to know someone already into a particular hobby to find out any more about it. Word of mouth is great when it works but it's unreliable.
It's the Economics! (Like the 60's) (Score:5, Insightful)
The big problem facing Facebook is difficulty of monetization. There are societal and cultural sensitivities around companies monetizing one's "circle of friends." This has been true since the early 90's with MCI's campaigns.
Cold mathematics (Google's way) doesn't have this problem.
I am reminded of a quote from the PBS documentary about the 60's. A woman was lamenting that so many of the movements had powerful societal traction, but no economic basis. So in the end, they faded away.
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A step back perhaps? (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought the magic of Google is that it's not (as) personalized, and I can get information outside my group of friends/peers. Frankly, my friends are great, but I don't go to them for advice on, say, programming; I go to Google. What's more, I couldn't get a lot of the info I get from search engines from my friends, because they just don't know. Social networking is awesome, but using Facebook in place of Google sounds like many steps back, at least the way it's being presented here.
Don't forget Advertisers! (Score:5, Interesting)
using Facebook in place of Google sounds like many steps back
The questions you ask your friends are going to be more limited. Feedback to advertisers in the form of data will also be more limited, therefore less valuable to advertisers.
You know what would be of *huge* value to advertisers? Social news techniques used *on* advertising. Hulu is in a great position for this. *Let* the users skip (or better yet, 40X fast-forward) the ads! If not that, then let users mod them up or down! Heck, why not tags, like "irrelevant" "obsolete" or "already own?" Advertisers would get immediate feedback on ad reception. Correlation to buying demographic buying habits would be easier to make. Decisions on where to put ad budget wouldn't have to be done at the huge granularity of a particular show or timeslot, but could be targeted directly at demographic cohorts.
Viewers would benefit, as ads would have to get better. Advertisers would benefit from the better, more watchable ads!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hulu actually already has this, in the browser. During an ad, if you mouse over the playing video, two icons will appear on the left hand side.
A thumbs up, and a thumbs down.
While they don't let you skip or tag, I think you get the idea. They could absolutely renovate and add more feedback options to end users, but this basic "I like it" vs. "I don't like it" has been around for quite a while.
Aardvark (Score:3, Informative)
Google will always have an advantage for me (Score:5, Insightful)
I can get useful information without signing up for anything. Facebook needs me to join and create a profile.
I am not a joiner.
Well I for one (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well I for one (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Well I for one (Score:5, Interesting)
How do you discover new things through Facebook when it effectivly blanks out any information provided by anyone not in your "network"?
I think you are using a different interpretation of the word "new" than the GP. He is using the word to mean "new to me". So something can be known about by his friends, but it is new to him, so he learns about it. It looks like you are using the word to mean "brand spanking new" so that you and all of your friends would be clueless aobut it. Both points are valid.
That is one of my major complaints about Facebook. How am I supposed to know if I want to be "friends" with someone if their profile is hidden from me? And I can't view their profile unless I am friends with them.
The whole thing seems like a dick waving exercise for people who have a lot of IRL acquaintances (not necessarily people they are actually friends with). Seemingly the only way to become "friends" with someone on Facebook is to know them already.
That is precisely why I use Facebook instead of Myspace. People are almost required to have an IRL connection to the people on their friends list. This makes it a lot more likely that they know the individual personally, so it really is a "network" and not random people who like to have friends online. This also improves the likelihood that the person is a REAL PERSON, not a spam page. This is opposed to Myspace where people have 7000 friends that they never spoke to (the real dick waving exercise), and you have no idea who is really thier friend, or even if they are real people.
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Give Me Dispassionate Information Any Day (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you rely on a Google for your knowledge, you get plenty of gossip, urban legends, ignorance etc, and worse you don't even know the people it's from, and whether there is any reason to trust them or not.
That's true enough if you're totally indiscriminate and don't use services such as Google Scholar. Let's say I need information on Iran.
First result: Wikipedia. I know it's pretty accurate if you avoid touchy topics. Since this is Iran, I'll poke around the citations for primary information but pass otherwise.
Second stop: CIA World Factbook. This is accurate. Surprisingly, despite your claim to the contrary, I do know who wrote this information and and how much I can trust it.
Third hit: New York Times
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"True Enough"
That's a title of the book by Farhad Manjoo
It is a human condition to search for the information that reaffirms a pre-established set of beliefs
(comes from the book) that reinforce our own opinions (like Slashdot).
Google weakness is their scope. When it comes to information, they are the GM of the 60's.
In house, vertical, total control.
Facebook banks on that a groups people that exchange information that they find _useful_.
Social networks should not be flat but holistic. They must grow withing
Re:Give Me Dispassionate Information Any Day (Score:5, Insightful)
Google weakness is their scope. When it comes to information, they are the GM of the 60's. In house, vertical, total control.
I don't understand this statement, I'm afraid. In what way is information gleaned from pages returned from Googling in-house, vertical, or totally controlled with respect to Google?
Social networks should not be flat but holistic.
Again, no clue here. Flat in what way? Holistic how? They should be looked at as a whole network rather than as individual people? I can dig that, but "flat" doesn't seem to be the contrary case. I'm also not certain what "good design of social networks" has to do with "getting information".
Facebook banks on that a groups people that exchange information that they find _useful_.
Alas, when information is passed primarily through the hands of the masses, what people seem to find useful is that pop-rocks and Coke are deadly, that newts mean water's good to drink, that accepting Jesus is the road to eternal life, and that B1gd1ck5432234 is sooooo drunk. Asking around on a social network is a terrific way to collect anecdotes, recommendations, and more mindless lolling than you can wince at, but is not a good basis for even the lightest and most trivial of research. No, give me a solid search engine paired with critical thinking any day.
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Apples and Oranges (Score:3, Insightful)
This is CREEPY sounding. (Score:5, Insightful)
humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information
I'm sorry but honestly I like cold logic.. This sounds like some sort of RIAA / Government control the flow of information justification and creeps me the hell out.
I donno sort of like this...
"why do you need to look at books Timmy? Why not just ask grandpa about it? What do you have to hide from your dear old grandpa timmy?" Why don't you trust that we know best.
It just sounds creepy but maybe I just have less faith in my family's wisdom than most? Anyhow I really don't see a battle here... There is more than one way to skin a search request....
The Wired heuristic (Score:5, Insightful)
A good general heuristic: plans exposed on Wired never come to fruition. Wired is where you go when you want to gain exposure for a plan that can't get traction.
So no, Facebook isn't going to challenge Google with any success. If they're lucky, they'll continue to be an interesting niche player, like blogs. More likely, they'll let their success go to their heads and they'll become MySpace, which people abandon in droves for the next flashy thing.
In this case I also RTFA and I think their plan is dumb: I use google precisely to find out what I don't already know. But even without RTFA, the Wired heuristic tells me it's a bad idea. That heuristic has served me well.
Trusting strangers vs. cicrle jerking (Score:3, Insightful)
That's basically what you get when you define "opinions from everyone vs. opinions from friends" negatively.
On one hand, in google, the recommendations and answers you get are from strangers. They may be experts, they may be deluded and full of it, they may actively try to misinform you. You don't know. Now, Google holds the creed that the majority isn't out there to "get you" and to con you, so the numbers work in your favor. If, and only if, the majority actually has the right answer. If you asked some 500 years ago the majority about the revolution of sun and earth around each other, the answer you would have gotten had been a wrong one. When your source is the majority, new insight is rarely possible. The majority never thinks "outside of the box", it usually goes with what's tried and (perceived) true.
The other extreme is relying only on your network of friends and other people who think like you (because else, they would probably not be on your friends list) for information. The danger here is that wrong information will become reinforced and more readily believed as truth because it will be confirmed by many. A says X, B agrees, C doesn't know, but he perceives A and B as experts in this field, so he takes over their theory as reality.
Either has its advantages and drawbacks. The internet is no dinner where you get your answers and informations served. It's more a buffet where you have them offered, but you alone are responsible to get the right ones.
Bad crowd (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the problems with the internet is that it gives people a chance to self select themselves into a tiny little corner of interstes that creates an echo chamber. I don't want recomendations from people I know to be prone to confermation bias. I want recomendations from a large body of evidance showing both pro's and con's. Nothing against Facebook, its just their users I have an issue with.
Militarism and the market. (Score:3, Informative)
Zuckerberg may be the cute face to front Facebook, but we all know that the (only) two other board member's Peter Theil and Jim Breyer are humanists of the highest degree.
Yes! because Thiel's extreme vision of capitalism where corporations control the whole world is 'humanizing'. TheVanguard.Org and 'The Diversity Myth' are humanist projects, not neoconservative? Support for the rich using offshore tax havens...that's the ethical human thing to do!
Jim Breyer's time on the board of Walmart, why, I'm sure he's helping Walmart become more caring, personal, and humane.
Greylock Venture Capital's ties to the CIA are also of no concern, I'm sure.
Can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.
I think It's pretty insane that people present their personal details in public via social networking. This same type of connectivity could be implemented with end to end encryption, signatures to verify everyone, and secure deletion. Social networks could be a p2p, open source, empowering service. Instead, people just upload their entire lives to the web, and use services run by some of the most extreme right wing members of the ruling class. WAKE THE FUCK UP!
The opinion of "the masses" isn't personal (Score:3, Interesting)
I have somewhere north of 300 friends on Facebook. Any question I might need help with would best be addressed to at most three of them. If I need to know something, I'm not going to find it out by asking my cousins. People I used to work with tend to know pretty much the same stuff I know in the field I used to work in. And so on. I haven't been able to enforce "you must be knowledgeable and a good thinker to know me" yet.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I have somewhere north of 300 friends on Facebook.
Do you actually KNOW any of them?
evil (Score:4, Interesting)
Just remember that Google still tries to not be evil. Facebook quite clearly has no such qualms about the standard sort of "corporate evil". Also Facebook invades your life infinite more than Google.
facebook==AOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Not happening, get over yourself. It didn't work the first time, it won't work this time.
Yeah right (Score:3, Interesting)
Get back to me when Facebook gives a damn what I want. Always changing the layout because of this stupid concept of 'sharing' every fucking detail of our lives. Tell me on the right side of the homepage that I should friend my 60-year-old former diffusion professor. Forcing me to use their stupid minifeeds and asshole applications. You know why people consult Google for shit? Because Google gives them what they want. Facebook is just for dicking around and bending over while millions of drones come back and bend over for Mark Zuckerberg to come up with some new fucked up idea for changing the layout and pissing off the userbase again. Whereas Google will always be the same old Google, typically (not always, of course) well in touch with their userbase, providing what you need and far more powerful than Facebook. And above all, Google gives me the entire web, whereas Facebook just constrains me to this stupid social networking concept. Seriously, if the entire web became personal profiles and Facebook fan pages, I wouldn't bother paying for my connection anymore.
Facebook's Vision? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, I, for one, am more comfortable with Google vision, which is not predicated on the idea of a single company having exclusive access to vast amounts of personal information.
By the way, it's easy to forget that what makes Google's "rigorous and efficient" algorithms work is that they model the work that all of the millions of people in the world do every day to build the web. When someone reads something online that they like, they create a new page and link to it. That is the powerful idea -- harnessing the work of real people -- that made Google work, and allowed it to supplant earlier search engines.
This is a false premise (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole genius of Google is that it is NOT "rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world". Search engines prior to Google would classify a searched for word or phrase by how many times it was mentioned in a page, if the word/phrase was in the page's title, or in the beginning of the page, perhaps in a header, and so forth. Google's algorithm was to do those rankings, but then to give enormous weight to what pages of that type linked to another page. So if a large majority of baseball web sites linked to the MLB's web site, MLB's website would be on top for a Google search for baseball (as indeed it is). This is not a dispassionate equation, but one utilizing human cognitive skills and social connections via the web to give you what you want. Google's surge over search engines like Opentext, Webcrawler, Excite and Altavista was precisely that it began concentrating on social connections on the web.
And insofar as non-search services - Google has Orkut, on Google Mail one could only get an account originally through an acquaintance, Google Earth has a Web 2.0 collaborative piece to highlight places in a local area, Google sponsors the Summer of Code and so forth. Facebook may be taking the social component even farther, but Google has never been just an icy monolith of sleek computers and dispassionate equations.
Google's data is much better (Score:3, Insightful)
Facebook cannot replace the internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this 'social graph' to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire - rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now."
Translation from Wired corporate shilling:
Facebook CEO envisions a walled garden controlled by Facebook, where your identity, network of friends, colleagues, peers and family belongs to FaceBook, and where Facebook is the primary source of all information, just as they've always dreamed of being. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query FaceBook to find anything, rather than using the far more useful and wide-ranging Google search, which might lead you to sites which are not hosted by Facebook. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where the real internet is now.
I've never liked sites like Facebook since they started off by trying to make everyone join their site before they can actually access content. Visit their front page, and all you see is an exhortation to give them your email address and some personal details - that tells you everything you need to know about their intentions and the utility of their site. Joining them means being data-mined by Facebook for every ounce of your worth as a consumer. Thankfully Facebook's vision of the future of the internet is about as relevant as Wired magazine is nowadays.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Visit their front page, and all you see is an exhortation to give them your email address and some personal details - that tells you everything you need to know about their intentions and the utility of their site. Joining them means being data-mined by Facebook for every ounce of your worth as a consumer.
Which is why I really don't know what is on facebook other than what I have heard through hearsay. Not worth the effort if I can't peek behind the kimono without baring myself.
My vision of the Internet... (Score:3, Interesting)
Zuckerbergs 'vision' (Score:3, Insightful)
IM sorry, but its really hard to respect anything this guy says. IMHO, he got really lucky with Facebook, and he simply doesnt have that much intellectual capital.
There is no battle... (Score:3, Insightful)
The internet is so big that Google and Facebook are swinging their swords, but are nowhere near each other and cannot really hurt each other. There is room for both 'ways', among the many many other ways the internet will be used as well. There is still a big IRC following and surprisingly a lot of people still on Usenet. I think its silly to act like the Google meme or the Facebook meme is in any way an 'end all' solution or method for use of the internet.
Does nobody see a privacy issue? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your mother in law will be delighted to help .. (Score:5, Funny)
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline.
And those family members, friends and peers will be utterly delighted to become an integral part of your private life. Just imagine having your private questions forwarded to your least favorite family member (lets say, your mother-in-law)
And that's just one immediate drawback. Other posters have already listed various long-term problems (cultural stratification, deprecation of "outside" information, etc.)
All in all, its a profoundly dumb idea. The fact that some schmuck (excuse me, CEO) calls it "his vision for the internet" just illustrates the kind mental vacuum that accompanies plans like this one:
The Internet is too important to be in the hands of the CEOs
Re:Facebook will begin to fade just like myspace d (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Where is the Wikipedia of social networking? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think he means just in terms of being organized by a mostly-benevolent non-profit organization, which collects some donations to run the servers and implement incremental software upgrades, and doesn't spend all its time trying to sell users' data to advertisers and otherwise "monetize" them.
I think we're fairly lucky that Wikipedia got to its particular niche first; for Wikipedia's many faults, if some corporation had gotten to the idea of "crowdsourced encyclopedia" first, and owned the results, I think the web would be a much worse place. In social networking, a large company did get there first, and I think the web is a worse place for it.
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