

Google at their best. Facebook at their best. - razin
http://bryce.vc/post/3789090127

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racbart
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.

~~~
lukeschlather
The thing is that Facebook has already started branching out, and they're
doing it wrong. When Google started adding things, your account was secondary,
and the tool was first. Most of the tools to this day can be used with or
without any sort of registration.

Facebook in contrast seems desperate to retain users. Nothing they create is
useful without a Facebook account. Rather than pushing out the best products
they can, they rely on the strength of vendor lock-in as a crutch.

I'm not even saying this is necessarily the result of some evil plan to take
over the web. It's just that when you have the kind of lock-in they have
you're loathe to give it up, and it makes you lazy since there are lots of
places where you have nothing to measure yourself against but your previous
performance.

~~~
nooneelse
> "Facebook in contrast seems desperate to retain users. ..."

As well they should be. Born by, and live by, the social network, die by the
social network. "You still using the old Facebook?" said with derision by the
cool kids is probably what echos in their nightmares. Not the name Diaspora.

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davcro
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.

~~~
mda
I don't see what you are trying to say. Google translate is a machine
translator, it could be less accurate, but it scales very well. It is probably
translating millions of pages per day. You are comparing a system to generate
voluntary translators for your quiz application to Google translate, these
things are very different and technology wise Google translate is a few orders
of magnitude more complex.

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rospaya
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.

~~~
barmstrong
I think that is part of the problem he was trying to point out.

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stanmancan
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.

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

~~~
seancron
What wrong with it? It looks perfectly readable to me.

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zandorg
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.

~~~
random42
Buying _profitable_ startups requires lot of money. Just buying them and
living off their profits, wont be sustainable.

