Google scared of Facebook? Puh-leeze
I have to say that until now I thought Josh Quittner was a pretty smart guy. He was at Business 2.0 magazine for quite awhile, and was editor when the whole shebang went down in flames not too long ago, and was an early convert to the blogs-as-media idea after Om Malik left. But the piece he just wrote for Fortune about how Facebook “has Google running scared” is pathetic.
I’m not saying that to be mean — but I hope the editors at Fortune (assuming there are any) really torqued his piece, because it’s just sad. It’s not just the odd part here or there either; it’s the whole thesis. Why is Google running scared of Facebook? Well, let’s see — it’s got lots of users, and it’s growing really fast, and several people have left Google and gone to work for Facebook.
I guess Larry and Sergey might as well close up shop and sell those planes then. Oooh, and one of the people who left was an engineer. They’re really hard to come by in Silicon Valley — and Google only has, well… about 3,000 more left.
But the biggest threat Quittner mentions (apart from the fact that Facebook “isn’t for sale,” which doesn’t seem like anything to be scared of really) is that Facebook is the leader in what Josh calls “the Innernet” — where people control who gets to see what information, and where the site protects you from all the bad stuff and bad people out in the Wild West of the Internet.
I remember another place that did pretty much the same thing, and it too seemed really big at the time: it was called America Online. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal any more.
Then Quittner says that Facebook is also a threat because of its widget platform, and that apps like Super Wall — which was created in a single weekend — have developed a “user base” of 10 million in no time at all. As he puts it:
“That’s a real economy (or could be, if someone figured out how to make money from it).”
Oh yeah — it’s a real economy. Except for the fact that, well, no one has figured out how to make money from it. Of course, making money is kind of central to most economies, but you know — whatever. Man, Google must really be quaking in their boots! They’d better buy Facebook for $10-billion or so right now.
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I read that too and laughed all the way to my meagre appartment to work on my dream of hitting it big time with my start-up too :)
funny article Matt, haven’t heard you be that blunt in a bit now.
~!Antje
Well said. If I hear one more person tell me that Facebook is going to kill [insert] my head will explode.
Facebook is a big flash in the pan in my opinion. I haven’t quite worked out what will replace it yet but something will for sure. All those apps are so annoying. I haven’t found one yet which is actually useful.
Hi Mathew, I was going to write a lengthy comment to Josh but I couldn’t comment on the article at the Fortune site itself. But I agree with you that he lacks substance in his arguments. Actually, he has gotten it all backwards. Facebook is NO match for Google. In my opinion Google has been working on a good strategy to become the social web OS, I call it “Google everywhere” for lack of a better name. They have Orkut which drives traffic (especially in Asia, think (payed) mobile services here), they obtained Jaiku adding mobile presence features to social networking sites like Orkut. They have a major stake in RSS with Google reader (and mobile RSS with Jaiku), they can leverage many different platforms for ads, whereas Facebook has only 1 closed system. Note that if Facebook will try to leverage their user-created network with ad pressure, the users will not like that. Google is working on the Gphone, a direct attack on the Microsoft mobile platform, there is talk of a Google PC, need we go on…. Forget Facebook. They won’t be able to monetize worth $15Bln (they do about $30mln a year now right, which is ridiculously low for such a large user base). If interested, I wrote about the Google strategy earlier:
http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/facebook-will-be-no-match-for-google/