Google at their best. Facebook at their best.

Facebook is so much younger than Google so it's a bit unfair to compare them this way. Facebook is still in such a crazy growth so they simply focus on their core business.

Google started launching their great non-search products (maps, mail) around 2004-2005 when it was at the same age as Facebook is today. And these products were or turned out to be supportive to their core search business as well. There were another couple of years before we've seen some great technologies from Google which weren't supposed to support their search business. So please, give Facebook couple more years before you judge.

Technical problems that Facebook solves in building and scaling their platform are enough challenging to require and attract the best minds in the industry. Let's see what these people will do when the dust settles a bit.

That said, I'm across the globe from the action and know nothing about these companies culture or attitude. But I still wouldn't judge Facebook yet.

Back in the day, I had a Facebook app called Quiz Monster that was utilized by lots of people all over the world. The app had international appeal because quizzes could be written in any language. For fun I coded an internal translation app heavily inspired by Facebook translations. I would type in an English phrase, select a target language. Then user's of that target language would see a dialog box asking "Do you speak english?" If they clicked yes they would be asked to translate the english phrase into their native language. After 25 submissions the program would stop prompting users. This usually took less than 5 seconds. The end result was a list of 25 translations of said phrase. I found the submissions far more reliable than Google Translate and used them to translate my app into many many languages.

The comparison doesn't make much sense.

Google has a wide range of services in multiple fields, while Facebook has a single product, a social networking platform.

Great article and relatively well timed. While it kind of seems like there can only be "one" internet giant at a time, and with Facebook "catching up" to Google, they are fundamentally very, very different companies. Clearly there will be some overlap, like with Gmail and Facebook messages, but considering Google's focus is technology and Facebook's is the social graph there's plenty of room for both of them to continue to flourish.

I still hate Facebook though.

Is there a reason why the font/css settings on that page make it practically impossible to read the text?

I guess if Facebook uses their huge valuation to buy startups which use Facebook's API, they don't have to invent their own products, and thus they make income by buying those startups which DO turn a profit.