Facebook Beating Google At It’s Own Game
Mark Sweney: guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 23 June 2010 13.07 BST Facebook’s global dominance is almost complete with just Russia, Japan, China and Japan yet to be converted and the social networking giant aiming to reach 1 billion users, founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed today. Zuckerberg added that in Russia Facebook had just 1 million users, the kind of numbers that saw AOL sell off Bebo and ITV relinquish Friends Reunited. But in Facebook’s case, growth is “doubling every six months”, according to Zuckerberg, and Japan and Korea have similar user bases. He also addressed concerns over privacy, explaining that Facebook’s meteoric growth had meant the company had been caught out while it was in “transition”. However, he added that the changing face of how privacy is perceived now that users are in a digital age meant that there were always going to be “natural tensions”.
“Six years ago most people didn’t want any information about themselves on web,” he said. “To start off people were a bit reticent about this. Then over time people think it is great to be connected and share things. I think the world looks a lot different now. There is a real natural tension between people seeing the value of sharing more stuff but wanting control over what they share.” Zuckerberg added that as Facebook developed it built privacy controls for everything. At one point there were more than 100 individual settings users could change, which it had been important to simplify as the company had to “transition [and be] pretty quick to adjust and evolve to 500 million users”.
By ROBBIE HARMON, Utah People’s Post Contributor Google recently entered the social networking arena with the launch of Buzz. If you have not seen it, Buzz is a social networking service that is integrated into a person’s Gmail account. Once you activate Buzz, all your contacts will be added into a new social networking model that seems to be a hybrid between Facebook and Twitter. It also has the ability to link other Google services such as Picasa (photo sharing), Youtube (video sharing), and Blogger into your network so friends can see new activity on those sites all in one place.
Why is Google so concerned about social networking? Despite what you may think, it is about more than just trying to provide you with cool new stuff. Google sees a looming threat from Facebook and Buzz is one way of trying to preempt this threat. Google, which generated $23.6 billion in revenue last year – is a relative giant compared to Facebook – which is thought to have had revenue of around $500 million in 2009. The reason Google is so worried about this little company doesn’t have as much to do with what Facebook is doing now, but rather what they have the potential to do and become.
Enter Facebook. Imagine a search engine that seemed to know your specific interests and tastes. Imagine searching for something and having the results ranked by factors such as your age, where you live, your occupation, your religion and associated values, the interests and likes of people you associate with, etc. In other words, imagine a search engine which adds factors from your social network to the current search algorithms used by Google. This concept has the potential to deliver very targeted and relevant information.
With Facebook’s rapidly growing – and already enormous – user base sharing more and more information online, this concept suddenly does not seem too much of a stretch. Google’s past behavior seems to indicate their recognition of this fact. In 2007, Google developed what is called OpenSocial in conjunction with MySpace. OpenSocial is basically a common language developers can use to build applications for social networks. Most of the large online social networks, with the notable exception of Facebook, now use this common standard. From every angle, this seems to have been an attempt to reduce the growth of Facebook by empowering its direct competitors.
Microsoft is also an important participant in this battle. Last year Microsoft launched Bing.com which touts many helpful features not available with Google. Perhaps what is most interesting in light of the recent launch of Buzz is the fact that Microsoft is a shareholder in Facebook. Combine Microsoft’s Bing.com with Facebook and all of the sudden the threat to Google becomes much scarier. (On a related note, it is expected that Microsoft will be releasing a public beta version of what they are calling Outlook Social Connecter as early as next week. This is said to be in conjunction with Facebook, LinkedIn, and others.)
Buzz has the potential to help Google improve the relevance of its own internet search model and thus strengthen its core business – all $23 billion of it. In the coming years, we should expect to see some significant steps forward in the way internet search results are delivered. The process of getting there is certain to be fret with privacy concerns and a continuation of the chess match we’ve been witnessing between the likes of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Posted by Nick O’Neill, AllFacebook.com: on June 24th, 2010 6:01 PM While there was a lot of speculation about Facebook’s search strategy, the company has confirmed with us that “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them”. Earlier this week we published about the new Facebook SEO that’s possible via the Open Graph, but now it’s clear that this is the beginning of Facebook’s internet search strategy. The race is now on for publishers to optimize their sites for Facebook’s search engine.
Under this system “link baiting” will give rise to “like baiting,” which is how Facebook determines the relevance of information. This has become a full scale attack on Google on all fronts at this point as Facebook has officially entered the internet search market. While many of the details of the Open Graph were initially revealed, it wasn’t clear what Facebook’s complete strategy would be and how big of a threat this would be to Google.
While we suggested that the like had just replaced the link, it has now become abundantly clear what Facebook’s intentions are. Facebook wants to launch the social semantic search engine. Now that the search results are officially showing up as Facebook search results, the war has begun.
Mike Mallek, eBizToolsPlus.com: December 1st, 2010 11:05PM If anyone, who in anyway aspires to be sucessful in internet marketing, ignores the rumblings from the “Mighty Google,” they do so to their own detriment. It’s also unwise to ignore the saber rattlings of the young upstart, Facebook. Google won’t topple easily, but Facebook provides tools that have the potential for raising up a new breed of successful internet marketers. Those who are ready to ride this new wave, will want to check out all that the Facebook arsenel has to offer. Take the time to check out and see what our Social Media Blitz Package has to offer. It’ll get you pointed in the right direction, for the price of a “Star Bucks.”
