Facebook and Google: Philosophies Collide
September 27, 2010
I listened to the Thursday, Buzz Out Loud podcast. On the show the talent explained that a certain high profile blog (Techcrunch) wrote a story about a rumored Facebook phone. The high profile blog garnered a meeting with the founder of Facebook (Wizard Zuck or Mark Zuckerberg). In that discussion, if I heard correctly as I was peddling my exercise bike at 66 year old goose pace, Mr. Zuckerberg point out something along the lines that social functions could not be added on. The idea I took away was that Facebook is built for social functions. Google was built for search or some other function.
As I thought about this, the comment highlighted what I think of as a “platform” fight.
The idea has surfaced elsewhere. I have started to write about the i2-Palantir tussle. That seems to be about lots of different technical issues, but it is really a platform fight. i2 has been one of the leaders if not the leader in data fusion and analysis for law enforcement and intelligence applications for 20 years. Keep in mind that I have done some work for the i2 folks. The Palantir outfit—stuffed with $90 million in semi-worthless US bucks—is a comparative newcomer. These two outfits are struggling to keep or get, depending on one’s point of view—control of a very esoteric market niche. Most of the azurini and mid-tier consultants steer clear of this sector. The types of baloney generated by the azurinis’ spam plants can harm people, not just get procurement teams reassigned. The i2-Palantir issue interests me because it is a platform tussle.
I think Facebook and Google are in a platform war as well.
Now keep in mind that if you are a Googler, you see the world through Google goggles. If you are a Facebook fan, you see the world through the friend lens. I am in the middle, and here’s my take on Wizard Zuck’s alleged comment about “adding” social instead of building a social platform.
First, I think the shift from Google to Facebook as a go-to resource is an important change. The reason Facebook “works” for 500 million or more people is that the information (good, bad, right, wrong, made up, crazy, or indifferent) comes from humans. If you have some relationship with that human, the information exists within a relationship context. When I run a search on Google, I have to figure out for myself whether the information is right, wrong, made up, crazy, indifferent or an advertisement. I don’t get much human help to figure out what’s what. As a result, the Google algorithmic and “secret sauce” results strike me as somewhat less useful now that there are “contextual” results and what I call “friend cues.” Your mileage may vary, but these friend cues also exist in services like Twitter and its derivatives/applications like Tweetmeme.
Second, Google is definitely in Microsoft Word feature mode. I am impressed with some of Google’s new services such as its new authentication method, which I will write about in one of my October columns. I am not too impressed with other Google innovations such as “Instant”. The ration of Word type features to useful features seems to be tilting toward the Microsoft model. I don’t use Word because it is a program that tries to do everything well and ends up becoming a wild and crazy exercise in getting text on the screen. My goodness: green lines, red lines, auto bullets, disappearing images, weird table behavior. Give me Framemaker 7.2. Facebook is a complicated system, but the basics work reasonably well even though the firm’s immature approach to information reminds me of the last group of 20 somethings I spoke with in Slovenia several months ago. Google is now at risk of letting features get in the way of functional improvements. Facebook is in refinement mode. When it comes to social, Facebook is refining social actions. When it comes to social, Google is still trying to figure it out.
Third, Google is a platform built originally to deliver Web search results in the manner of AltaVista without Hewlett Packard in my opinion. Facebook is a platform built to let those who are young at heart find old and new pals. Google has morphed search into advertising and now faces the challenge of figuring out how to go beyond Orkut, which as I write this is struggling with some crazy virus or malware. Facebook is, according to a rumor I heard, working to provide search that uses the content within the Facebook ecosystem as the spider list. Curation versus search/advertising. Which platform is better to move search forward in the social space? Google is layering on a new approach to people and content and Facebook is simply indexing a subset of content. Curated content at that.
My view is that Facebook and Google are in a platform battle. Who will win? Wizard Zuck and Xooglers who know technically what Google errors to avoid in the Facebook social environment? Googlers who are trying to keep an 11 year old platform tuned for brute force Web indexing and on the fly ad matching run by smart algorithms?
Interesting platform battle. And a big one. This may not be a Socrates-hemlock type of tussle but it is a 21st century philosophical collision.
Stephen E Arnold, September 27, 2010
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