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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.
Seriously. Why one way or the other. Why not both?
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
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.
-Matthew Riley "TofuMatt" MacPherson
I have a website
I don't see facebook as anything else other than a fad that will begin to go away. I already deleted (not just disabled) my fb account and know many other people too after graduating college.
Sounds like Facebook wants to do something similar to Aardvark - http://vark.com/ Basically you ask a question and it finds people in your "network" and poses the question to them. You get pretty good answers from people around the world.
I can get useful information without signing up for anything. Facebook needs me to join and create a profile.
I am not a joiner.
Do not want to have searches, research, news exposure, etc, mainly recommended by my friends and social network contacts. It's way too limiting. And it's not just because I don't have any friends. People don't even necessarily have the same interests as their friends. Peoples opinions have value, but so does objectivity. Think about buying a camera. If you only base your decision on your friends recommendations, you would never look at anything 'new'. Somebody needs to do that.
Seems to me it's just the opposite; I can easily see it being mainstream for the next few years at least. And anyway, MySpace never grew at the same pace as facebook at any point, did it? Also, MySpace seems to have more of a reputation for being for 13-17 year-olds and pedophiles, while facebook has more of an aura of an "Every-man's social network".
Friends, family, colleagues, and peers as my primary offline information sources? Only if I want gossip, urban legends, extemporaneous answers to avoid admissions of ignorance, and rambling anecdotes. If I need actual information offline, I use reference works. I don't want "passion" in my information; I'd rather have facts and data. Thanks just the same, Zuck, but please go back to your tea party and let the grownups deal with information systems.
It doesn't make sense at all to compare these two sites because I don't think I have ever mistaken Google for facebook. Facebook will never be a place for looking up statistics unless those statistics consist of "Who is going to my party tonight", Facebook influence is small and limited
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....
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.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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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.
I think the moment you start writing reviews of your doctor friends, Facebook explodes into a giant flamewar.
This is my sig.
http://meta.slashdot.org/story/09/01/09/1456216/Roland-Piquepaille-Dies
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!
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Is it just me and a few other people, or is this becoming common. I am really getting sick of facebook. I don't really use it as much as I used to. There are just too many things that I don't rally like. It would be nice to know if there are others that have quit or slowed their use of facebook.
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
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.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
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
Zuckerberg wants to create a walled internet where everything goes through facebook. We've seen it once before, back when it actually had a small chance of succeeding because a lot of the general public didn't know any better.
Not happening, get over yourself. It didn't work the first time, it won't work this time.
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.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Google Wave (be sure to watch the video, it's long, but there is lots of interesting stuff in it) will provide a system based on open standards and open source code. It will let folk use their own email inbox, IM client, and blog as the focus of their communication with the world. The open federated model will end the stovepipe model where I must have 5 IM systems, 3 to 5 social networking systems, and hundreds of blog logins what I must keep track of to communicate with folk. FaceBook will probably integrate and play with it, so they won't die overnight, but they wont' become the center of the internet. Google Wave, assuming it works as envisioned, will probably cement the "Google at the center of the internet" model, but it will leave room for other players, probably even help them, even those who could challenge Google Ads.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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.
Facebook and everyone's "friends" do nothing but pass around a bunch of bullshit, half truths quizzes to determine who your sexual partner should be. Both models should exist but one is good for learning (Google) and the other is good for a laugh (Facebook).
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!
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.
... is not being spammed with 200 goddamn "Mafia Wars" requests every time I log in. Seriously, Facebook is slowly approaching MySpace levels of obnoxiousness... and it hasn't gotten better as Facebook started trying to "out-Twitter" Twitter. I used to log in multiple times a day... now I only log in once a week or so to clean up all the annoying notifications. Zuckerberg should have sold back when the economy was booming and his company wasn't facing exposure as a mere fad.
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.
Good-bye
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.
I am certainly in the minority here, but I cannot be the only one who does not want there whole social network knowing so much about them. Call me old-fashioned I suppose... but I much rather be a mystery than a well-read novel. I just cant help but think about how many people in business will be bit in the ass by things posted online! You know HR depts. look at these things if they can. If they have a FB dev account in IT somewhere, then maybe the phone interview can get replaced by a FB profile browsing. ;)
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
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
Wait - is this the same Facebook that locks out your account if you post too much? And that refuses to post the rules for how they determine you are "abusing" their system? Facebook is a prime example of the least common denominator becoming the market leader. A horrible user interface, pathetic functionality, zero personalization - and a jillion users. AOL 2.0
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Instead of Facebook's community assistance, and Google's assistance from the cloud, a third way is Rbate's model of assistance from professional helpers, which includes a search engine that's dedicated to allowing people to find such helpers.
Helpers can not only include the usual forms of professional information, advice, and assistance (professional reviews, aggregators of consumer reviews, and full-service retailers), but consultants and recommendation engines that can offer more personalized service. Relying on reviews takes too much work to find and understand the information you're looking for, while retail service, which has often been pretty clueless, is further suffering due to competition from online and discount outlets.
If you pay these helpers for the help they give rather than the ads they expose or the sales they mediate (retailers & affiliates), you can make it easier for professional help to be free.
Eventually though, people be willing to pay fees for professional assistance for more products than just big ones like investment advice.