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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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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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