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Comment by swernli | Hacker News Reader

>Google has a much better revenue model since it is not tied to there being a conflict of interest between them and their users.

I wholeheartedly disagree. Google is also in the business of using any tracking data it can gather on users to deliver ads. Google's primary money maker is advertising, whether in search results or in banner ads. Their customers are not their email/chat/docs users, their customers are the companies that buy advertising. Email/chat/docs users are the product that they sell to advertisers when they promise that the ads will reach an audience. The free services they offer are the honey pot to convince the users to get an account and be tracked. Google is in the same precarious position as Facebook, people just talk about it less.

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The difference is that Google's various products, unlike Facebook's, provide data that isn't strictly necessary for their ads to be relevant. As their giant pile of money attests, simple targeted advertising based upon search queries is more than enough to build a giant empire upon.

They won't wither on the vine if their various other session-based tracking datasets, such as those you mention, are cut off for whatever reason. The same can't be said of Facebook's trove of private information they're apparently banking on selling to the highest bidder.

The bottom line is even if there are some short term successes for Facebook via targeted advertising from social network data, they will live in constant fear of a bad news day causing all Facebookers to log into their account and uncheck the "share my personal information with 3rd party sites." It could be an overnight death, at any moment.

Those folks might also kill their GMail accounts for the same reason, but they'll still be anonymously searching Google for information and getting relevant ads.

That is a really good point. Google can survive without specific personal data. Facebook cannot, by definition. That is a major factor in Google's favor.

people opt-in to google when they use it to search - they want to find something, and if an ad helps them do that, ok!

people opt-in to using gmail, gdocs, gchat, because they want to be more productive, and if an ad eventually leads them to do that, ok! Ok maybe this isn't so true but come to think of it, I've never once seen an intrusive non-textual ad in any of those services ...

people are not opting in to facebook in search of services or to be more productive. They are there to hang out with their friends. Nearly any ad in that context can be labeled as "not wanted".

Let me ask you something, do google text ads really bother you? what about facebook ads getting added to the stream? If yes to either; why?

"what about facebook ads getting added to the stream?"

Does the fact that those do not exist have any bearing on the conversation? I'd find ads mixed into my search results pretty darned troublesome; Google is not stupid enough to do that, though.

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