Facebook eats Googles lunch by 2012 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook eats Googles lunch by 2012

nerdr.com

4 pointsxnerdr16 comments

Oh good--post a link to your own poorly-reasoned blog post on Hacker News. Terrific--there's 5 minutes of my life I won't be able to get back.

1.) I'd be a lot more inclined to take your opinions seriously if you would take a moment to spell check your work before posting it. It's not that difficult really--use Chrome or Firefox--spell checking is built in.

2.) <sarcasm> You heard of this phone OS called Android? I hear it's really starting to catch on. I think it's somehow related to Google. But they'll never catch up to Facebook's smart phone OS--what's it called again?

Yep Facebook is bound to eat Google's lunch any day now. Because Google is staffed by a load of incompetents who'll twiddle their thumbs while Facebook nimbly beats them to death. </sarcasm>

There's nothing insightful or worthwhile about your blog posting. Don't waste your time. More importantly don't waste my time by linking to this poorly-reasoned, misspelled tripe on Hacker News.

How much of Google's revenue do you expect to be generated from Android OS? Further, Facebook apps are on apple and android products, giving them a larger market share than android alone could ever have. The OS alone will not be generating revenue.

I'm thinking about $1.3 Billion or so in 2012.

http://www.talkandroid.com/29769-googles-android-os-could-br...

Also, I will add, nearly every article you read on Hacker news is a blog post on the submittors own blog. Is their something wrong with doing this?

If you found it so terrible, why did you continue reading for a whole 5 minutes and not stop after 1, clearly it must have had some value.

Google makes the vast majority of its current revenue from search and email, not from Android. $1.3 billion is projected and is about 3% of $32 billion a year revenue, the vast majority of which comes from search. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=GOOG

While I agree that spelling mistakes are painful to bear, I believe you are being too harsh on the author. As someone said on Quora [1]:

"Sarcasm is most appropriate when shared between two people who have similar thought patterns. That's when sarcasm is actually funny. When the sarcasm isn't shared, it's usually an avenue of passive aggression."

[1] http://www.quora.com/Is-sarcasm-ever-appropriate/answer/J.C....

Facebook message cannot replace email until I can contact people who are not on Facebook through it.

I do not want to have a social connection to everyone I exchange messages with. I swap occasional emails with workmates, but that doesn't mean that I want to see their every move in my status updates.

It would be a trivial addition to the Facebook network to allow outside email exchanges. What I was trying to get across in the article was how Facebook is just 1 step away from directly challenging Google in email and search. Two of the biggest areas of revenue for Google. They have the purpose (money) and they have the ability. I think they're going to do it sooner than anyone expects.

yes but your trivial "1 step" is actually - build a world class, global scale search engine that is at least as good as googles. There is no sign whatsoever that they are even trying - search in facebook is pretty basic IMO and frequently fails to find stuff I have found before using the same keywords

If they build a space ship, something that they are also "1 step" away from doing they can eat Virgins lunch too!

Sorry, I meant the email functionality is 1 step and trivial, since they already have an inbox system in place. The search would be much more difficult to do well of course, but i'd suggest a recommendation based search (like Google +1) could be up and running within a year quite easily given their resources.

I'm not sure if you already got the invitation to the new Facebook Messages, but yes you can contact people off Facebook. It gives you an email address that other people off Facebook can contact you.

I'm not sure why they're doing the Gmail-style invite-based roll out because that diminishes the fun, but it might be due to capacity.

He forgot to mention that Facebook also has an Oscar-nominated movie about it. Match that, Google!

This has been predicted a few times before. Just saying.

Facebooks ads ARE NOT higher quality than google. First off, adwords gets an order of magnitude more clicks (CTR). These people are buyers, looking for something, not trying to post comments on their friend's photos. Second, the people who do click on facebook ads are much lower quality. From our data, google users convert ~2.7X more than facebook users and the price difference in CPA does not make up for that difference.

I've found the opposite case when advertising my app on both networks. Conversions were about the same, but cost per click was about 4x on google. Its a $4.99 one off payment app, so its possible different revenue models find one or the other better for their use.

To be fair we are not an app and are targeting a demo 35+, so that could be an issue... We are also doing some decent volume (few K+/day on both), if we were doing a coule hundred $/day I'm sure we could get FB working as well, but finding it VERY hard on large volume. Not to mention banner blindness sets in after a few days on FB so we are constantly changing ads.

You can't generalize your claim to every case. Facebook ads may not be higher quality than you, but for many it is. Its goal isn't necessarily to take a purchase intent and turn that into a sale. Its target advertisers are similar to those who currently advertise on TV. For example, does watching an ad about Kool Aid make you want to immediately want to purchase it? No, but it influences your subconscious in a meaningful way.

If you look at the other replier to you, his case is different. Facebook ads are specifically for those companies who would benefit from very fine targeting, who have a long term business horizon, and want to build an image before a purchase.

What do you use Facebook ads for?

(Disclaimer: I was an intern on the ads team)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com