Wait, hold up.. Facebook is evolving Google? Is that a typo?
No, I truly believe that Facebook is changing the face of not only search, but also email, advertising and discovery of news – all things that up until now the vast majority of Internet users have turned to Google for.
The evidence is all around us my friends, all you need to do is study some of Google’s recent moves and product launches to see that the search giant is being heavily influenced by the success Facebook has experienced in the past several years.
Google Buzz
This new product, revealed and rolled-out to users just this week, is Google’s “Facebook killer.” Basically, your inbox through Gmail becomes a social network of its own. Your email contacts? They are now ‘followers’ in much the same way both Facebook and Twitter connects people. If you want to share a link, a video or even photos you now can. Technically, you always could through Gmail, but now the sharing is one-to-many. It’s been pretty impressive how seamlessly Google has built Buzz upon the foundation of an email client.
What does this mean for Facebook? Well, i don’t think people are going to abandon Facebook to use Buzz. However, this ’shot over the bow’ by Google may accelerate Facebook’s plans to dramatically improve its own internal messaging service. Code named ‘Titan”, Facebook is continuing down their road of becoming a unified login for all of your web experiences, and email is just another natural means to that end.
Search and News
Google is the undisputed leader in web search, but even they know that the future is in real-time data. Thats why they have signed deals with both Facebook and Twitter to include social data into their search results stream. Funny thing is that Facebook has both the ability to search the web AND search the real time stream from its own users.
As for news, how many of us have news broken to us through our social connections before seeing it on TV? Google news is a tremendous news aggregator, but in my experience, rarely used directly. News from Google News gets aggregated and distributed at the top of search results, but I almost always hear the big news of the day from either my Facebook or Twitter friends.
Advertising
The other day, while listening to the Howard Stern show, Stern mentioned that he wasn’t sure how Google made money. Easy, they make it just like every other internet web site – through advertising. Although my work experience these last 10 years have been in search engine marketing, using predominantly Google AdWords, I can tell you that Facebook has the stronger platform.
Not only do I get keyword targeting, but i can target a users likes and dislikes. Facebook advertising has been covered on this blog before so I won’t go into all of the details. Suffice to say, Google can (and will) learn a lot about advertising by copying Facebook. I believe that its only a matter of time before you can target users in a more ’social manner’ through Google AdWords using tools specifically made for Google Buzz.
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