Is Facebook killing Google softly? - A study

Before people feel obnoxious about the rather ambitious title this article ventures through, I must put you to peace by this self-quote:

Behind every successful machine, there is a human, always watching.

I know you are lost in the mazes of correlating it to the title but, a well researched article from Wired may help you realize what seems to be less convincing unless you see the real objective in the future. Long entry short: Facebook can actually creep into the empire of Google by denying them what they do the best, show your project to the world and profit.

Let’s just think for a second, Mark Zuckerberg says

Google is a top-down way of organizing the Web that results in an impersonal experience that stifles online activity. You have a bunch of machines and algorithms going out and crawling the Web and bringing information back, That only gets stuff that is publicly available to everyone. And it doesn’t give people the control that they need to be really comfortable.

Right now, if you are not techie enough, you donno how to hide yourself from Google despite being present in the internet handsomely coz they say, if you are not in Google, you aren’t born yet. Sure, that is one sleazy piece of humor. But come to think of the irony. It is true. And that is where this rather fictional apprehension of this topic may mean something to you i.e. what if you had a platform where you can simply decide what to share with whom, what not to. Here its not only a social networking platform we are talking about, we are talking about a more humanitarian web that is controlled by you and yours.

Living by Example

So, is there something that can inspire you? yes. Copyblogger shares:

The analysts at Hitwise claim that celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton now gets more traffic from Facebook than from Google - more than 7 million pageviews from Facebook alone. If that trend increases, then the current wisdom about web traffic is about to get turned on its ear.

So, what if more and more people come to think of it seriously? With humans you get direct audience telling you what they like, what they don’t, what to write next and what not to and etc without having a machinery matrix like Google in between.

The Utilitarian Aspect

Right from the trend that Orkut itself started and Facebook utlized (thanks to their enviously large user base) is keep search engines (read: Google) at bay. Talk about poetry to P4 computers, you get more direct and immediate solutions from humans in Orkut or Facebook than any google engine can gift to you because, what google does is to help you reach a probabilistic result as its just a machine at the end of the day.

Some Facts for the Rationale

I know sane minds just don’t get bogged down by abstract theories. So here are some pictures I will like to present to you. Make your own collage.

• More than 200 million people—about one-fifth of all Internet users—have Facebook accounts. They spend an average of 20 minutes on the site every day
• Facebook has stolen several well-known Google employees, from COO Sheryl Sandburg to chef Josef Desimone; at least 9 percent of its staff used to work for the search giant
• Facebook denied Google and opted for Microsoft for a percentage of their share. It was kindda embarrassing and unexpected as Google insiders pointed out later.
• By Facebook’s estimates, every month users share 4 billion pieces of information—news stories, status updates, birthday wishes, and so on. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. All of that is carefully shielded from Google.
• Right from the talks of failed acquisition talks with Twitter to Open ID collaboration to Facebook connect, Google has only followed Facebook if we see it chronologically.

[Information source: Wired.com]

Conclusion

Google’s Friend Connect or Google wave are actually hinting towards Google’s way of foreseeing internet as a communicative zone rather than a Q/A type vision of internet. But let’s realize this. A service runs by three most important parameters: Quality, Efficiency and Performance. In all these departments, Google’s standard is reverential. If Facebook wants to match them or surpass them in a parallel track, sure its very promising and believable but they will have to DO it. To reach Google’s scale, you just can’t depend upon people to join you or I-got-lucky badges. You will have to bring in some magic that will transfer the world reverse in the order of alphabet from G to F with all possible pun intended.

At the end of the day, Facebook and Google are just the highest degree representatives of a deeper and wider circumspect. The real war is between the acceptance of machine driven internet or a more humane internet. As thousands of people are getting net-savvy everyday, a real life won’t be too different from a virtual life in coming years. So, now its upto you. Who do you wanna see when you log in to your internet - A bot or a friend?

Or may be both.

The society has been lenient enough to live by the rules of- Live and let live. But that is if and only if Facebook and Google think of exisiting mutually, which my friend, isn’t very likely in the future.

The war is just started.