That used to be a great tag line in the early years of the net until Yahoo took their eye off the ball and before they knew it, people were Googling instead of Yahooing. With a great story behind it about two young guys from college figuring out search algorithms
( I know I should have listened more in maths class) and eventually turning the company into a global behemoth, Google quickly became the front page for most net users.
How long will that last, now that Facebook is asking its members to tag it as their homepage? Okay so I'll know what my cousin is doing in Laos but how will that help me in business, searching for information and keeping up to date with global trends?
Will it be a battle between social search versus data search?
With over 550 million members worldwide, Facebook is looking to turn itself into an OS (operating system) where everything is interconnected via those 550 million (and counting) threads along with over 1 million websites already integrated. With 60% of the top 100 US websites and 50% of the top 100 global websites integrated, the workings of "likes", "shares" and ancillary Facebook interactions give this site enormous clout to share information and do business on a different platform to Google and phone technology. Interestingly Mark Zuckerberg recently released Facebook's latest attack on Google's Gmail with "Facemail" (sorry I just made that up, they still call it email).
A long time ago I owned an Elvis album with the king on the cover in a gold lame suit with the album title " A million fans can't be wrong". That was when a million seemed a big number but when compared to the Facebook traffic of 700 billion minutes spent by members per month on the site, Elvis must be shaking his head while packing groceries down at Safeway. Before you get your calculator out, 700 billion minutes equates to 1.3 million years spent on Facebook by members every month.
Everyone talks about SEO but they'll need to consider SMO (social media optimisation) as our net relationship changes and E commerce phases into F commerce for the social consumer. Facebook will integrate platforms to challenge Google Docs, Google Voice and anything else that Google throws into the fray because Facebook is convinced we want to interact with each other and not just with an algorithm.
The above gives the feeling that Facebook is doing all the right things against Google but Google made one big mistake and that was not getting Sergey and Larry a movie deal. Mark Zuckerberg, portrayed by Hollywood's favorite geek Jesse Eisenberg now has the upper hand in celebrity and social commerce and has Google in his rearview mirror or the other way around if you listen to Google.
What's Yahoo doing while the big two fight it out? Maybe there's room for one more maybe not, you get to decide.
1 comment:
Yahoo's still a going concern in online presence but they back-end their search off to Google. So if you do a search on Yahoo it's actually coming from Google.
The really interesting thing going on right now is integration between Facebook and Skype. Soon, if you have a Skype account and you're logged onto FB, you'll be able to voice or video chat with online friends. And if you log onto Skype, you'll see who of your FB friends are aonline that you could speak / video with.
The real battle ground is in mobile devices. Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch have Facebook and Skype apps, the Skype app is really quite good but no video because it competes with their Facetime. Google's Android operating system has a number of poor Facebook apps and Skype sort of works but not everywhere because some mobile carriers don't want the competition for call minutes, and definitely no video. So it seems that Apple is the most open of the competitors at the moment, notwithstanding that Google's Android is meant to be open source.
When all of this gets sorted out and everyone supports everyone else's apps and protocols, it's going to be pretty cool.
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