Corporate rivalries often revolve on little differences. Take Coca Cola and Pepsi's decades-long battle — whose product is really the real thing?
That's what makes the rivalry between Facebook and Google at times seem a strange one, because the two companies are so, well, different.
But the internet is a crowded place and, stripping away the interfaces, there is one, principle product the two companies are hawking — information — with its inevitable sidekick, advertising.
Once thought to be Google's domain, through its rapid growth Facebook has, by accident or design, infiltrated the field.
The boom of Facebook's Like function, reported in The Financial Times on Wednesday, is a clear example of just how this is happening.
While Google uses algorithms to determine relevance from web searches, Facebook, by giving its users the chance to highlight what interests them in cyberspace, has started to create its own map of the web, and one that is overtly social and subjective.
Exacerbating the rivalry between the two companies is the simple fact that much activity on Facebook cannot be tracked by Google, which means that as more people turn to the social networking site as their primary port of call on the Internet, the search engine loses something of what makes it tick.
Conversely, the Like function has been installed on over 350,000 other sites across the Internet, each of which feeds back to Facebook, whose store of information grows.
While Google's ventures into the world of social networking have so far floundered, Facebook has, through the spontaneous cross-posting of links, begun to direct a great deal of Internet traffic of its own.
That said, Google has hardly stood stagnant as Facebook has expanded. Twelve months ago, the search giant's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said the company would be aiming to do a deal a month.
Since then it has brought 26 new companies under its fold and hired Craig Walker as "entrepreneur-in-residence," paid simply to come up with new ideas.
A possible service dubbed Google Me is the subject of the latest rumour that the search engine is preparing to cross into Facebook's domain.
But as Miguel Heft wrote in The New York Times last Thursday, Facebook too is "laying the groundwork for it's second act," through the introduction of a virtual currency system that could one day evolve into a multibillion-dollar business.
The virtual currency, named credits, was introduced by Facebook over a year ago as the method of payment for certain games on the site.
The New York Times reported: By the end of the year, Facebook expects that Credits will be used to buy the vast majority of virtual goods sold on Facebook.
The fast-growing market is expected to reach $835 million on Facebook this year, according to the Inside Network.
To bolster that market, Facebook began selling Credits gift cards at Target stores across the country this month.
For now, Facebook says it simply wants Credits to help foster the growth of virtual goods transactions.
But Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, said recently that the company may choose to do "a lot more" with Credits in the future.
Over time, the company plans to turn Credits into a system for micropayments that could be open to any application on Facebook, be it a game or perhaps a media company, according to people with direct knowledge of Facebook's plans.
They spoke anonymously because the plans have not been announced publicly.So maybe Facebook and Google are different after all, and competing not over information, but over ideas.
Facebook appears to be pushing towards paradigm shift in the way in which the Internet is used.
For a long time, search engines have been accepted as a necessary kernel of the web. By providing users with a "data base of humanity" could Facebook be changing that?
The battle between the two web giants could be seen as much as a battle between philosophies as it between products.
The algorithmic approach of Google or the network-driven model — that relies on us surrendering more and more of our privacy - of Facebook.
No comments:
Post a Comment