Facebook or Google – Who Rules On Line World?
Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and its CEO since April, was just born 11 years before Mark Zuckerberg, his counterpart at Facebook; the two belongs to different Internet generations with different worldviews.
In Page’s web, everything starts with a search. You search for news or for a pair of shoes or to keep up with your favorite celebrity. If you want to learn about a medical condition or decide which television to buy, you search. In that world, Google’s algorithms, honed over more than a decade, respond almost perfectly.
In the recent years the web has tilted gradually and perhaps inexorably, towards Zuckerberg’s world. There, rather than search for a news article, you wait for your friends to tell you what to read. They tell you what movies they enjoyed, what brands they like, and where to eat sushi.
Facebook is squarely at the centre of this new universe, which connects the people and much of what people do online these days starts there. But Facebook’s masterstroke has been spread itself across the web and allow others to tap your network of friends. As a result, thousands of websites and apps have essentially become satellites that orbit around Facebook. You can now go to yelp to find out what your Facebook friends says about the new coffeehouse down the street, or play Zynga games with them. To make matters worse for Page, much of this social activity can’t be seen by Google’s web-trolling algorithms, so every day they become a little bit less accurate and relevant.
This shift to a more social web changes everything for businesses and consumers alike. Among the first industries to be rocked: advertising. Google may capture 41% of today’s US$31 billion U.S. online advertising market, including the lion’s share of the search-ad market. But the growth in search advertising is slowing, and advertisers are putting more of their limited dollars into Facebook, with its 800 million users, many of whom spend more time on Facebook than on any other site.
Facebook displays-ad revenue is expected to grow 81% this year, while Google’s display-ad will rise an estimated 34%. Both Google and Facebook would have you believe there is room for each to drive forward and could grow by the billions in the display market without engaging directly and stealing market share from the other.
Like Bill Gates a decade or so earlier, Page is seeing his company’s grip on the tech world loosening. So he’s fighting back with mammoth effort to grab a piece of the social web. His first substantial act as Google’s new CEO was to ramp up the considerable financial engineering, he aimed at Facebook’s turf by releasing Google+ and 40 million people have signed up in only four months.
Zuckerberg knew Google+ is the first credible threat Facebook has faced since it sailed past MySpace to become the world’s No.1 social network. (Anything that tarnishes (Facebook) its halo could impact its long awaited IPO with a valuation that is expected to top US$ 80 billion)
Shortly after Google+ made its debut, Zuckerberg signaling that employees were on notice to work around the clock on, among other things, replicating some of the most praised Google+ features. Zuckerberg doesn’t like the defensive moves, and in September, at the company’s F8 developer’s event, he unleashed a sea of new features that alter the current service radically. And it’s expected the company will launch an ad network eventually that will harness all those social actions to help advertisers target consumers better across the web. Smartly deployed, it could further threaten Google’s position as the king of online advertising.
While most of us spend our days casually toggling back and forth between our Gmail accounts and our Facebook newsfeeds, down in the heart of the San Francisco Peninsula it’s on war.
Google finally introduced Google+ in June. A social network that cloned much of what people like about Facebook and eliminated much of what they hate about Facebook. You will find familiar home and profile pages, tabs for photos and games, and of course the endless updates from friends. Google+ 1 button works much like Facebook’s Like. Facebook lacked a good way to separate workmates from classmates from real friends, so Google+ was built around Circles, an intuitive way to group people in buckets.
After word leaked that Google was starting work on “Facebook killer” in summer 2010, Zuckerberg called on engineers to work nights and weekends for 60 days to revamp key social features like photos, groups, and events. Just as it did then, the cafeteria opened up on evenings and weekends this summer, and children dropped in for dinners and good-night hugs before their parents logged back on for late nights. By September they released a slew of new features like better grouping tools to mirror those Google+ circle. “This is serious, and we should take it seriously”
For Facebook, the early success of Google+ mean Zuckerberg can no longer afford to screw up. In the past, Facebook’s frequent product missteps and privacy snafus were by and large forgiven or forgotten. From now on, Google+ will stand at the ready, more than happy to welcome any disgruntled Facebook uses – not to mention their friends. In other words, as he soldiers on Zuckerberg must now keep an eye on Page and his troops. In most of the recent quarter, Google added nearly 2,600 employees. That’s almost as many people as work at Facebook, and they have a clear mandate: to turn Google into a superpower of the social web.
