

"Google Me" social network rumors fueled: it's real, heavily staffed - adrianwaj
http://www.fastcompany.com/1664980/google-facebook-social-networking-media-quora-dangelo-buzz-rumor

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uptown
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.

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theprodigy
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.

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far33d
This is the second time this week I've seen a blog post here on news.yc that
was based 100% on a Quora answer.

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noahr
Time to do a story on Quora!

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petervandijck
Quora schmora. Just a forum where the digerati like to hang out, for now.

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seiwyn
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.

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enygmata
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.

