Facebook to overtake Google in the next 18 months
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
Facebook was an elite product, it required an Ivy League address just to get through the door and established a set of middle-upper class brand credentials. Facebook is now the default, it's full of crappy games & dodgy ads. Every shitty website has a like button. It's has an irremovable reputation for a lacadasical approach to user privacy. Everyone and their grandmother are on there, FWD:FWDing Glen Beck nonsense and Farmville requests.
Every market has stratification, we define ourselves by our brand associations. There is a hole where there should be the Mercedes, the Apple of social networks to Facebook's Dell. All that's needed now is something new to come along that woos the elite and Facebook's long term fate it sealed. There's a chance it'll be Disapora but there's a very good chance it won't.
That's not to say it won't be around for years to come but it has, to used a hackneyed phrase, jumped the shark and the difference is that Facebook's value comes from it's userbase, not its services or technology. Once the top end start bailing the rot will set in fast, momentum shifts with dizzying speed on the web. I've been thinking about this for a while, I figure if I'm right, I'll be able to point to this in a year or two and smile. Not quite as profitable as shorting FB but hey, it's just speculation for fun.
Facebook's increasing focus on business customers will be at the detriment of regular users, who will be demoted to the rank of mere 'consumers'. It's a subtle - but important - distinction.
Facebook's decision-making will increasingly be driven by thinking like "how can we monetize all this wealth of consumer data" or "how can we introduce tiered fanpage packages to business customers as a revenue stream" rather than focusing on what makes a great user experience. Currently, knowing that my friend has achieved another 'badge' in Mafia Wars adds zero value to my life. It only gets worse as Facebook focuses more and more on business brands. What do I care if my friend 'likes' Apple or Nike? How does that improve my relationship with that person? People I am really friends with in real life don't care what brands I like, or what isotonic sports drink I drink. They like me because of me. Much as businesses would like to think that people define their lives by the products they buy (this is like the opening scenes in 'Fight Club' where Edward Norton's character tries to pick out stuff from an Ikea catalogue that defines himself) that's not a basis for a relationship. And Facebook used to be all about relationships. Now I look at my Live Stream...and it's got all this random flotsam floating downstream. I care about none of it.
The reason I love HN, incidentally, is because it's the polar opposite of MySpace and what Facebook is gradually becoming. Real people, that I share a lot in common with, expressing their real opinions, no auto-generated crap, and zero bling. You see comments like "What could cause FB to die?" here on HN. They're so big at this stage, with the power of network effects and lock-in, that external competition is no threat to them realistically. The only way they will die is if they continue exactly the way they are now, making people's experience ever-more spam choked, till people realize "hey this experience is actually quite shit, even if I do have 500 online friends" and start looking for alternatives. We're not quite there yet though.
I won't be surprised if in a few years, there's a new hot social networking site and Facebook gets supplanted. It all seems so fadish to me.
[1] http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com+myspace.com/
Being the Mercedes or the Apple of Social Network would be great... but it would be a failure as a social network. The example you give of brand association could make sense for luxury items. Those items' value increases the less people have it (to an extent). But a social network's value needs a large group of users.
For your scenario to make sense we would need a form of open FB: then some people will go for the popular option and other will go for the elitist option, but they would all still be able to link to each other. Diaspora seems to be attempting something too big, so I doubt it will succeed.
We could break down Facebook to its basic constituents, and make those open. Some already exist: a messaging system (email) and IM system (Jabber). We would still need an open notification system (a la Twitter). Webpages are already open and a personal webpage could act as your profile just as well.
The last ingredient would be a way to define your circle of friends. Something like FOAF, but with stronger proponents/backing. Once that's all done, anyone could come up with their own Facebook: these would be a simple wrapper around what all these technologies.
It is possible a base-level platform will emerge to make it possible for this to happen but I don't think it will - the value for companies is in linking it all together, the value of such smaller networks for the users it that they do not link together.
Say: I am a University student. They could give me instead of an email address, a userid to access my University page. This would be a webmail client, an IM client, a place to put my photos/CV/essays, _and_ they could be link to each other and to other similar services via FOAF or others.
Then I move to work, and I get another bundle. And so on.
The killer feature for me on FB is: it's all integrated so once I got someone on FB I get their email/IM/photos/etc... Plus it helps finding people by searching among the connections in your social network.
I'd like to believe that but I can't find any figures to substantiate it, I think it's a bit premature to make that statement unless you're looking at a specific group of users.
I see you've qualified your statement as speculative.
My personal 'data' is limited to my friends and family, and there is some anecdotal evidence that a facebook account has a 'lifecycle' that is measurable in a relatively low number of years whereas a google one seems to be long enough that we haven't been able to detect its length.
Even game usage seems to have plummeted on my feed.
I think you are right; Facebook has a lifecycle - so it's reach will probably flatten out (I'm guessing it will drop a bit first) and it will end up with a slow churn of new users taking the place of inactive ones.
Facebook in my opinion is a trend, like yahoo chat was or usernet. Its a way for people to communicate and people move their groups and places where they hang around on the internet all the time, but everyone needs to do their weekly shopping, that is everyone needs to search and unlike real life supermarkets, on the net there is just google.
I think searching is more of a necessity, at times perhaps more than friends. My friends might for example not be able to tell me about 1200 BC, something which a history student might need to know, or to tell me how I can code something, which google might be able to tell me.
Some friends might be able to. They might be able to tell me things which google can not. Facebook however is only a platform where one interact with friends. As I said hanging out places change all the time. Unless however something revolutionary comes forward to make search a different experience, I do not see the number of visits to Google falling for the foreseeable future, while I might be able to in regards to Facebook. Chatroulette for example could have been a great contender had it not been overtaken by penises. People might also decide to physically hang around more once they get bored of the novelty effect of facebook. Unless they want to spend hours in a library however, I do not see people suddenly deciding to stop using the internet for searching.
In conclusion, google, or searching, is a necessity, Facebook is merely a substitute which can not, quite, become a necessity as it can not quite compensate for actual interaction with friends.
There is a google.ca, google.fr, google.co.jp, google.de, but there is only one facebook.com
So yes, the whole of Facebook will be used more than Google by just the Americans. Is it such a big deal ?
There are seperate MySpaces for each "region".
In any case, comparing any metric of this sort between two sites that are so different, and that do such different things with their visitors, seems rather pointless to me. Like comparing unit sales volumes between a company that makes mobile phones and one that makes cuddly toys, or comparing one hospital's survival rates for heart transplants with another's for cancer surgery.
Ah yes, my grandfather told me about when he first created his Facebook account back in 1950.
Might want to fix that typo :)
I think they are pretty solidly established as the "biggest" :)
Few other interesting things to note of the alexa graph is:
- Facebook crossed youtube traffic just about an year ago.
- Google crossed yahoo traffic only late 2008, that too mostly for yahoo traffic went down hill.
- What caused the sudden rise in internet usage in oct 2009 (for all top sites sites except yahoo show a spike in traffic). Can't be early christmas traffic, guess facebook triggered this high adaption of users who spilled onto other sites too.
After all, this is about 'reach' and 'uniques' which translates in to people not pageviews.
I happened to look more into the global top sites http://www.alexa.com/topsites/global. It is lot more confusing - Google's India, German, HK, UK sites are considered separately. A clear example is http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/SA and http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/Italy where the top site is not google.com, so these users are not accounted in .com but use other google properties or variant country TLDs.
It seems that's not the case, they're still growing at more or less the same rate (to my surprise).
I wouldn't mind analyzing a days worth of logs of either company, but I don't think I have a machine large enough to store the files on (nor enough CPU to process the data).
It would be quite the goldmine of information.
I don't know if counting 'embeds' makes much sense though.
See: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com
Then click on the 'more' link under the flags. Google keeps trying to redirect me to google.nl but I always set it back to google.com and it looks like I'm not alone in that.
For example .co.uk and .com.hk, for example, have a global reach of 3 and 4 percent respectively (I've made a guess that those are the top two alternate domains).
So already that is a significant boost to the Google stats.
(edit: checked .fr, that is another 3% reach)
(edit2: .de and .in are also in the top 20 and contribute 3.5 and 4 percent in their turn. I make that a [rough] grand total of 57.5% reach.)