Six weeks ago, I blogged about Facebook’s announcement of a new business model that encourages people to develop and distribute applications on its platform. I also mentioned Paul B. Allen’s prediction that Facebook will become the largest social network in the world
Now Advertizing Age says that Facebook is Google’s biggest competition. Sure, Google is the 900-pound gorilla for search and has one of the largest databanks about users, but Facebook poses a real threat because (1) its network of connections between people knows comparatively more about each of its users than Google does and (2) Facebook is becoming a viral distribution platform unrivaled by any portal or search engine.
Facebook is growing at a stunning rate–nearly 30 million users now–with no signs of stopping. Viral distribution is the most powerful form of marketing and promotion. The potential is huge, and Facebook might have the upper hand.
I’m very interested to see where facebook will take to internet experience. Is this the next phase of the internet’s evolution?
http://cottrellsteve.blogspot.com/2007/06/evolution-of-portal.html
Is Facebook really Google’s biggest competitor? I personally don’t see any competition between the two companies. They are two companies satisfying two completely different internet needs. The only area of competition would be for Internet Advertising and I don’t think the one company is worried about the other stealing its advertising. As I read the article it never really stated why Facebook is a competitor. Honestly, Yahoo or Microsoft would be Google’s biggest competitor. MySpace is Facebooks biggest competitor.
Kevin,
You’re right, you don’t usually think of Google and Facebook in the same sentence. I think the parallels are in: (1) Traffic. The more traffic (of any kind), the more advertising dollars. So they are competing for advertising dollars. (2) But I think the real competition isn’t in their current markets (search and social network)–it’s in what they are trying to grow into–application platforms. Now that Google has huge traffic, it’s branching out into applications (finance, documents, spreadsheets, calendar, etc.). Google wants to become an application platform. So does Microsoft. So does Facebook. Google and Microsoft have tons of money to develop it, but they’re keeping their code proprietary and trying to do it all themselves. Facebook has opened their code to let the public develop it. We’ll see who wins.
I don’t understand really understood this obsession with Facebook. Yeah, it’s cool, and it helps you stay in touch, but it is hardly a threat to real websites.
Apps is OK, but among my ~250 friends, almost none are using any applications of real utility; they’re all little friendly widgets that are sometimes cool to have (more often asinine clutter), but ultimately unfulfilling and integrating the functionality of most full-featured websites (excluding a few niches) within that little box is difficult and annoying.
Facebook hasn’t “opened their code”. They’ve provided an API. It’s not a revolutionary API, from my experience; it makes it relatively simple and quick to access Facebook’s databanks from within your own program, but every other decent API ever does this too.
Likewise, the importance of becoming the de facto “platform” within your sector has been understood in software development for years, and Facebook is not the first website to provide users with an API. Digg, Yahoo, Google, last.fm, and many others beat Facebook to the punch with solutions that aren’t altogether too different.
I don’t understand why Facebook is lavished with such undeserved hyperbole.