“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”
OK then, I admit this title is slightly intriguing. Of course, it is still hardly conceivable to use a social network in order to perform Internet search. But Facebook has at least 3 common points with Google indeed :
1) First of all, it is one of the brightest success of the Internet industry. Although its revenues are not known for sure, many pundits estimate them at somewhere between $50 and $100 mln per year, not including the nice undisclosed sum Microsoft agreed to pay in order for Facebook to use their online advertising tech
nology. Moreover, Michael Arrington (Tech Crunch) revealed that according to an internal document leaked from Yahoo!, the Internet giant considers that Facebook will generate around $1bln revenues annually by 2015. No surprise then that Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year old whizz kid who designed this social network a couple of years ago, turned off a stunning $ 985 mln takeover proposal from Yahoo!. Apparently Facebook really believes it is worth much more than that, which is confirmed by the weird growth rate of their already huge 25 million-large user base (see chart). In fact, it even seems that an IPO could be very, very successful….
2) Technology. Now this is more interesting. According to an interview of Zuckerberg by a CNN journalist, “Facebook will no longer consider itself merely another social network. Instead it is becoming a technology platform on which anyone can build applications for social computing“. Or to say it briefly: Facebook wants to be the next-generation OS, competing in a way with Apple, Microsoft and Linux ! To be honest, their project seems slightly less ambitious: the management envisions to foster (through partnerships) the development of a vast online application ecosystem around the website Facebook.com, application being here modules for Facebook – try it, and you’ll understand better. Although these little applets fall short of matching true applications for now, one must admit that Facebook is very convincing when it comes to grab its share of the time spent online by Internet users. So applications may be just at the right place here…
But the most striking news here is that recently, Google as unveiled a bunch of online services more or less likely to replace some traditional desktop applications, such as Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Maps, Picasa, Notes, Calendar… An IT engineer friend of mine revealed me that some of his reknowned teachers at France’s top-notch Computer Science School EPITA truly believe that this approach will eventually meet a large success, and that an online Google OS could very well pose a serious threat to Windows. In fact, we could be reverting to the old terminal/mainframe conception of computing – you know, the good old time of IBM giant systems -, but on a larger scale. So instead of debating of Vista vs. Ubuntu vs. Mac OS X, we could be comparing Facebook and Google OS in a few years time.
3) Finally, the founder of Facebook (Zuckerberg) is as Jewish as Google’s fathers (Brin&Page) which will certainly nourish the vivid sentiment in some countries that Internet is basically a Zionist conspiracy 
. Right, who cares about what they think in Malaysia ?
Hi Steve,
I agree with you on Facebook’s evolving business model, making it a prominent actor on the online landscape. It’s moving from a simple community website to a content sharing platform. The famous Facebook’s “share” icon took time to be widely used, but now seems to have entered the member’s habits. Like digg or technorati, it allows to qualify websites, video or blog posts referencing. On this point, it is indeed a threat to google leadership, challenging the model of automated website referencing.
Comment by Leonard Sellem — May 28, 2007 @ 15:25
Hi Léo,
Actually, Facebook could be a very good customized homepage, something that Google isn’t as of yet.
It seems that it aims to do even better than sharing video/text/pictures, like for example editing directly pictures within the web page, something only advanced AJAX principles seem to allow.
Comment by Steve Danino — May 28, 2007 @ 16:33
I am not sure Facebook purpose is to become a customizable homapage, like Netvibes or Google. Its model is too restrictive, allowing only licenced third-parties to develop applications. I think it will better compete in a short term with blogging plateforms, making it easyier to find one’s friends and to share content with them. Facebook is originally a community plateform, and I think it will remain so.
Comment by Leonard Sellem — May 28, 2007 @ 16:39
Leo, have a look at the CNN article I’ve quoted in my post. Although this details only the vision of Facebook’s management and probably not the reality for the years to come, we should take them very very seriously…
Comment by Steve Danino — May 28, 2007 @ 17:14
To me this discussion is very surprising! I always took Google for a search engine combined with an advertising departement. Facebook instead startet as a real web 2.0 social community – and all that was easy and comprehensive.
Now things get difficult as Facebook reaches out for new goals. My question is: What will Facebook’s community do? Will they stay? The students only wanted a cuddly playground and now things get very different. Isn’t that a risky strategy for facebook?
Comment by Matthias — May 28, 2007 @ 18:40
Matthias, I do not mean that Facebook tries to become a search engine. Did Leo and you actually read my post ?
To summarize what I said: both Google and Facebook are developing online applications, that could in the mid-run replace desktop applications, and why not completely bring light out of conventional OSs.
Comment by Steve Danino — May 28, 2007 @ 18:56
http://blog.jeffkee.com/2007/02/25/the-facebook-revolution-using-apis/
Facebook’s API concept is a great one, and they have their own query language platform set up already for data retrieval.
The extendability of Facebook by 3rd party developers is what makes it very powerul, potentially.
They already added a classified advertisement system, additional applications within your own profile that you can add at will, etc.
Comment by Jeff Kee — May 28, 2007 @ 21:49
Finally I got it! Ok! But this does not answer my question. Because Facebook today makes the money out of it’s huge (and further growing) community.
Beside that I never meant that Facebook would enter the business of search engines. There Google is much to far ahead.
Concerning the new OS: David Gelernter talks about something similar, I think. See here: http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0507/156.html
My opinion to both Google and Facebook: At least for the next few years I will trust Microsoft and be happy about my licences. They let me work independently of the internet and store my files at my own place. Why should I share any secret either with Facebook or with Google?
For me Microsofts business is safe as long as we do have to pay for internet access. But how many years will this go on?
Comment by Matthias — May 28, 2007 @ 21:52
@ Jeff : Thanks for your post ! I should have had a look before.
Actually I have seen Facebook’s applications getting more and more popular in the recent days, but I did not understand how they made it, neither did I believe it corresponded to an offensive strategy…
@Matthias: You are right. I also truly prefer a “standard” OS, traditional desktop applications, etc.. My ISP keeps unplugging Internet occasionnally, just imagine how painful this could be if most of my work was done online !
But although OSs are alive and kicking, this trend towards online application is doubtless.
Comment by Steve Danino — May 28, 2007 @ 22:11
Once again I think I disagree quite strongly with you Steve, I don’t believe in web-based OSs. Unless of course you mean by OS a core set of applications like e-mail, text editor etc.
Also, a reality check, as far as I know, Facebook is nothing in Finland, where as Google and Microsoft are (naturally) used a lot. I bring this up because even though Internet has homogenized a lot of information (Google, Wikipedia…), there are still a lot of regional differences. One only needs to take a look what is the major IM network in different European countries. For example, no-one I know uses either AIM or Yahoo! in Finland, but there are people still mainly using ICQ. The vast majority are Live Messenger users.
Web 2.0 seems more and more to me as presentation layer people trying to fix infrastructure layer stuff (I read this excellent description in some blog I can’t remember anymore). If it’s terminal/mainframe stuff, Steve, you’re after, Sun’s been working that angle for years and years. You know, the company, who has the slogan “the network is the computer”? I doubt Facebook can never rival the solutions Sun and other traditional companies have created for mobile web infrastructure.
Comment by Kari Silvennoinen — May 29, 2007 @ 08:02
Hi Kari,
” Unless of course you mean by OS a core set of applications like e-mail, text editor etc.
” => more or less.
You would have probably noticed that I did not mention “web based OS” in my post. For example, I don’t believe in a Google OS either.
What I meant, more precisely, was that if most applications are now web-based, and therefore OS-independent, then as I said “light is shed out of the OS”. The most important game is then not fought between OS providers but rather betwen online application providers.
For the “terminal/mainframe stuff, Steve”, you’re absolutely right: Sun has been advocating this approach since decades. I can even recall when in 1997, McNealy (Sun’s CEO) compared computers with water taps, suggesting that the characteristics of the computer (including its OS) will be fully secondary to the quality of the Internet access.
However, you and I surely agree that this visions still remains far from reality… at least for now. I found interesting to see that both Google and Facebook are actively working in that direction though.
Comment by Steve Danino — May 29, 2007 @ 10:16
Oh, BTW, I forgot to mention that Adobe has launched an online photo editing tool.
This is significant…
Comment by Steve Danino — May 29, 2007 @ 10:57
[...] surfing wordpress tags I found this entry on facebook’s business [...]
Pingback by Facebook Thoughts -- Harvard University « Campus Entrepreneurship — May 29, 2007 @ 17:00
Excellent discussion – to add some figures on Facebook. Facekook is multiplying its size very YEAR. No doubt that they will be strong in Finland in some months and everywhere else in the world, at any place, reaching any social sphere and people from very different ages.
Many analysts says that Facebook will not eat the internet entirely, because Microsoft and Google already tried, and they were not successful. Contrary to those analysts, I really think Facebook wil eat the entire internet. They will be the internet inside the internet. There will be Facebook and the rest of the (internet) world.
Before everyone used one’s computer to access the internet, and in fine to access services. Now everyone will use a computer to access internet to access facebook to access services. An interesting figure would be to analyze how many startups Facebook killed or will killed (e.g. birthday Alarm, photos services …) and how many new creation they will make possible inside Facebook with their platforM. Go to developer.facebook.com and watch the F8 video.
No wonder why Marc Z. refused the takeover bids: Facebook is much more valuable than anything. It is worth 25% of the internet value – how much is it ?
Comment by Ronan — June 5, 2007 @ 11:05
Hi Ronan,
I couldn’t agree more on the potential of Facebook. Even if MySpace has more users, even if FB is nowhere in Brazil (vs. Orkut), UK (vs.Bebo), Finland (apparently) , I really believe in an advanced social network being a perfect portal for accessing the Internet.
Nonetheless, one shouldn’t believe to much in the internalization of applications / services in one website or portal. After all, even if a social network cannot for now compete technically with Facebooks, there still is and will be a room for sub-applications such as photo sharing, editing, IM, etc…Because they are focused on a single part, these specific applications or services just have a tendency to be constantly improved, and therefore much better than complete integrated packages.
It’s like the PC industry: even if you do sell the best PC ever, you will still find far better components available on the market. The collection and integration of all these is not an easy job, and certainly only a few players can do it well; but hey, you can’t just pretend control the whole chain, and develop yourself OS, CPUs, GPUs, hard drives, RAM, peripherals, and all that. At least you will never offer the optimal products all along the chain.
Apple has tried, and failed: IBM has tried, and failed. No doubt opening up even more the “application” network and enhancing compatibility with third party software or Internet services should be the right way of doing for Facebook to definitely wash away competitors.
Yet this means accepting diversity, pluralism and competition, like IBM did when they sub-contracted chips and OS dor their PCs to Intel and Microsoft respectively.
Comment by Steve Danino — June 5, 2007 @ 12:17
[...] 1) Facebook. With almost 60 million active users and a valuation well above the $10bln, everything is rosy for 2007’s most successful social network. Despite some recent mistakes, Facebook might very well be the next Google. [...]
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