One component of what drove the adoption of Facebook was that it provided an opportunity to peek into the lives of classmates you'd lost touch with, or maybe never really were very close with to begin with. It was socially acceptable to request a connection from somebody simply because you were in the same graduating class years ago, and the payoff for both people being connected was to get a look into the private lives of somebody you knew something about.
The problem Google faces is that for everybody that's already got a Facebook account, this motivation has already come and gone. There's a large handful of connections that remain in my Facebook account that I probably wouldn't bother to request or accept if given the opportunity on a new social network. While you could argue that this provides a "cleaner" social graph, from Google's perspective the more connections, the better as it provides one more piece of insight into their users.
In order to be successful, the next social network must incentivize its users to form connections with some other payoff, because Facebook has already spent this one.
The author is guilty of time traveling here. Obviously now we know that social networking CAN be viral. Its always easy to look back and say "how did they miss that?".
Also, buzz was meant to compete with facebook? I always considered it more of a twitter knock-off, as the user experience is much more like twitter than fb.
Google is definitely playing catch-up now, but its a mistake to count them out. Myspace got replaced by facebook, so another power shift (although unlikely) is not unthinkable.
Google already owns the Orkut social network and probably it would be better to just improve it. If the "Google Me" thing is real, then it might be a huge shift from the former.
Google dropped the ball of Facebook and needs to seriously get caught up.
google and facebook are going to be competing in the online targeted ad space. Both have two different ways of delivering it.
Google delivers targeted ads based on intentionality. I want to buy a yoga dvd so i use google to find one and research. google then places yoga dvd ads with my search results.
Facebook approach will be provide an environment where people and their friends interact/socialize/share with each other. Facebook wants you to also share as much as possible about yourself, like what music and movies you like, etc.
This is important because every action in the facebook realm can be tracked.
For instance they have a chat, messaging, wall, etc, communication features.
Chat is an internet representation of phone calles, messaging/emails represents the internet version of snail mail, etc. So just imagine if you had the godly ability to listen to all the phone calls made in the world or read all the mail being sent through the post office. Facebook has that ability.
Facebook can have the psychographic profile of you based on what profiles you visit. If you visit the entourage, louis vuitton, etc profile pages profile can make the assumption that you are a pretentious person and target goods sold to pretentious people.
What I am getting at is facebook can track everything you do in the environment they create. This information will be more valuable the better they get at connecting the dots and developing matrixes. The infromation will also get better the more you share and willing to let other people know about you.
Facebook has ok metrics, but as time goes by they will better metrics to deliver targeted ads. The more people join and get comfortable with the more valuable facebook becomes because their data gets better. There is still a lot more room for this. What is good about facebook is people don't know they are giving up this information. So it is unbias data. People are giving up marketing information without even knowing it.
Facebook's approach to targeted ads is get the best information about you, construct a good profile of you and deliver the approporiate ads. That profile will become so valuable the more the drivers i mentioned above improve.
I am pretty sure the facebook can make money other ways, but they are sitting on a goldmine with targeted ads.
So it will be google's intentionality driven ads vs facebook real personal data driven targeted ads. Both can complement each other, but I think real personal data targeted ads is a huge market that google wants to get into because google is in the business of targeted ads plain and simple.
The problem Google faces is that for everybody that's already got a Facebook account, this motivation has already come and gone. There's a large handful of connections that remain in my Facebook account that I probably wouldn't bother to request or accept if given the opportunity on a new social network. While you could argue that this provides a "cleaner" social graph, from Google's perspective the more connections, the better as it provides one more piece of insight into their users.
In order to be successful, the next social network must incentivize its users to form connections with some other payoff, because Facebook has already spent this one.