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Google Declares War on Facebook
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After the search giant upgraded its social-networking tools yesterday, Douglas Rushkoff says its battle with Facebook might come with collateral damage: your real-life friendships.
To Google, it’s just a new, relatively minor set of upgrades to one of its many applications. To Facebook, it’s a declaration of war. Google wants in on “social,” and the search giant may just have the size, weight, and leverage to take it.
But a scorched-earth battle over our social networks may leave casualties in its wake, particularly if we start to look at our friends the way either of these companies do.
Google announced this week that it is putting a few new bells and whistles on its Friend Connect software. Users visiting sites that have the application installed will be able to fill out little profiles of themselves and see the profiles of others who have been there. Presumably, regular visitors of the same sites will seek each other out based on shared opinions and preferences. And make friends. Think of it as Facebook functionality without the Facebook.
Putting Google’s application on your site means your ads could work better and you’ll get more money. Which do you think most bloggers are going to choose?
Of course, Facebook has been working on basically the same thing, Facebook Connect, for about the same amount of time. And while Facebook can’t claim to have come up with the idea of putting a social shell over the otherwise non-social sites of the Web, the company did feel relatively safe as the Internet’s social leader. Social is its turf, and a realm in which Google has yet to make a real dent. Google may own our data, but Facebook owns our social networks.
Each service has its advantages. Google’s is easier to install—in fact, the company automatically turned it on for every site using Blogger. Facebook’s version is a bit more transparent in its privacy policies, and feels like a bit less strange to use since Facebook is already the place and brand through which so many of us do social networking. Letting people be their Facebook selves on a Web site makes some intuitive sense.
The real difference between the two services is the intention of the companies behind them. Facebook has extended its functionality onto the Web in order to draw us back onto Facebook. The more we use Facebook’s apps to find and connect to other people out on the Web, the more committed we become to our profiles, walls, and posts back on Facebook. Google doesn’t have a networking hub to draw us into, so what’s in it for the search giant?
Why of course, as with everything Google does, the real goal is more and better targeted advertising. Indeed, the most important (but last to be mentioned) upgrade to Google’s Friend Connect is a feature that allows Web sites to target advertisements to individuals based on their Friend Connect profiles. No, Google isn’t really providing us access to each other. It’s providing advertisers with better access to each of us.
So who is going to win? Google, of course. And it’s not because the company is better at social. It’s because Google is better at making money, and helping others do so.
Putting Facebook’s application on your site only helps your visitors connect with others who have visited. If you’re selling or publicizing something, and you’re lucky, maybe they’ll even talk about how great your products are, and then broadcast parts of their conversation back to their “walls” on Facebook.
Putting Google’s application on your site means your ads could work better and you’ll get more money.
Which do you think most bloggers are going to choose?
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
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Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media studies at The New School University and producer and correspondent for the PBS Frontline Digital Nation project, is the author of numerous books, including Cyberia, ScreenAgers, Media Virus, and, most recently, Life Inc., released this month by Random House.
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This is incredibly misleading. The majority of Facebook users are not even aware of Facebook Connect. These two products target a tiny minority of the internet population.
Unless Google comes up with a site to compete with Facebook directly, they don't stand a chance.
I hope google succeeds in this, I'm not a particularly big fan of Facebook and would more then welcome an alternative. Between all the horrific apps that nag you to the barely there revenue model that forces them to make a nuisance of themselves (since they don't have alternate ways of getting money like Google) Facebook is a blight people deal with because its what everyone else uses.
I would greatly prefer a system based on content and context instead of meaningless wall and status update junk, lets hope it takes off.
"Facebook is a blight people deal with because its what everyone else uses". Well said. Sums up why I use it and most of my friends as well.
lol, the same way google declared war on MSN Messenger / AolIM, and subsequently on Skype with Google Talk?
Facebook succeeds not because it is the best at what it does (it never has been), but because of the install base. People won't change. AolIM and MSN messenger were beat out by Facebook if anything, possibly somewhat by Skype. Google Talk was a better product, but unless there's an initial draw (unless they require people to sign up and use it when they use google search), people won't leave facebook.
I really have not seen much about Google's upgrade until now, and I use Google as a search engine all the time. However, if all Google wants to do is dump more advertisements on people, I don't think they will be able to build a sustainable social networking medium. They will likely kill their project before it even gets anywhere.
Once people get fed up with all the ridiculous ads originating from Google, they will drop Google like a rock and go elsewhere else... either to Facebook or another site that affords the user more privacy and control of information.
I think Google's approach is even more intrusive than the myriad of advertisement garbage I already have to deal with, whether on a search page, blog, or email. I consider all of it to be SPAM, and unwanted. Wherever possible, I quickly remove it. I don't think I would ever use Google's social networking app if I knew the results would be a lot more intrusive advertising. A word to the wise at Google.. if you are really serious about doing this, you had better give your users some ability to block or control the ads.
As already mentioned, Google needs to think about "What's In It" for their users and build an app of real substance before worrying about advertising revenues and their bottom line.
Sharksta, I disagree. When an ad is completely irrelevant to me, I see it as intrusive obnoxious spam. If it's advertising something I'd be likely to want or need, I welcome it. Bring it on I say.
I hear you, Farser. But on a certain level, I'm less concerned with what it does to the visitor to the site than to the operator. Ads are becoming the only sacrosanct form of content online (we're happy to mashup anything off TV or the music industry, but bloggers don't mashup those Adsense boxes on the sides of their pages, now, do they?)
Google is pretty good at figuring out "what's in it" for users. In this case, it's some social networking capabilities across the internet. Whether people will really adopt this, of course, has yet to be seen. But Google is trying hundreds if not thousands of things.
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