Slashdot Mirror
The Battle Between Google and Facebook
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.
The problem is that the target isn't you, or the general slashdot audience. It is the advertisers, and they are interested in easily suggestible numbers. The more people, and the more suggestible, the better. Facebook also seems better targeted to guiding people to what they didn't know they needed-the advertisers' best friend. I think control of the Internet in this sense means control of advertising dollars. Like you, I'm going to stick with Google and discount anything I see on Facebook. But like you, I am in the minority. The real question is what the majority of people on the Internet will do.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
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.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
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.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
I don't really get Facebook's vision for the web. It seems like wishful thinking to me. That is, they're starting with the fact that they have all this data that they want to use to make money, and they're envisioning what a world would look like that would make them insanely rich.
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.
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.
Frankly Microsoft, undeniably, share that "antimatter" characteristic with Stallman, and although they haven't demonstrated much in the way of competence to exploit it, Zuckerberg / FaceBook aspire to that level of domination. Philosophically, Google doesn't, even though they dominate search quite thoroughly, Wolfram Alpha and Bing have recently shown that there is room even in search for serious innovation, and potentially come competition.
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 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.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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!