

Facebook to overtake Google in the next 18 months - jacquesm
http://jacquesmattheij.com/Facebook+to+overtake+Google+in+the+next+18+months

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msy
I honestly believe Facebook is on the way out.

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.

~~~
nanairo
I would like to believe you. I really would. But it's hard to see how your
parallel applies.

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.

~~~
msy
It depends on what your view of a social network is. My personal opinion is
that people do not have a social network, they have a series of occasionally
overlapping social networks. That all current systems are incapable of
reflecting this is what causes so much friction and conflict. A social
network's value doesn't come from lots of users, it comes from the right
users. Fragmentation of the market away from monoliths towards many niches,
with individuals have separate and distinct profiles on each would make them
far more representative of the real world.

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.

~~~
nanairo
Sure, but the same way people have two email addresses, one for home and one
work work, they could have two of these bundles.

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.

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patd
This data is biased. Facebook.com is used all over the world while Google.com
is mainly used in the US.

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 ?

~~~
chopsueyar
Also interesting to note is that MySpace does, in fact, segment by regions.

There are seperate MySpaces for each "region".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace#International_sites>

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gjm11
"Overtake" is an ambiguous word. If these extrapolations are correct then
Facebook will get _more unique visitors_ than Google some time in the next
year or two, but why use this metric rather than (e.g.) total number of
visits, total amount of traffic, amount of time spent at the site, revenue, or
profit? On some of these I would guess that Facebook's been ahead for a while;
on some, Google is probably well ahead for the foreseeable future.

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.

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jackowayed
> _Google has been around for a little over a decade now, and facebook a
> little over 6._

Ah yes, my grandfather told me about when he first created his Facebook
account back in 1950.

Might want to fix that typo :)

~~~
jacquesm
Haha, that was not the thing I intended writing, thanks, will fix it right
away.

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ErrantX
This as may be. But Google have 7 of the top 20 sites :) Five of which are
Google search.

<http://www.alexa.com/topsites>

I think they are pretty solidly established as the "biggest" :)

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jyothi
You might want to consider youtube traffic there, which is #4 on alexa rank.
This will push the cross over by few more years for even statistical
predictions.
[http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com+facebook.com+youtub...](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com+facebook.com+youtube.com)

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.

~~~
jacquesm
It's not so easy to undouble between youtube and google, my guess is that
since youtube is a google property that it actually is a subset, so it would
not make a whole lot of difference. Only those people in the youtube set that
are not yet in the google set would skew that graph and hence the conclusion.

After all, this is about 'reach' and 'uniques' which translates in to people
not pageviews.

~~~
jyothi
True the overlap might be very high and it is extremely hard to find the
common userbase with the available open tools. Will have to wait for hitwise,
comscore or someone to publish a report.

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.

~~~
jacquesm
The reason why I looked in to this (this time) was because I was wondering if
the whole privacy backlash had put a dent in facebook's growth.

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.

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terpua
I'm assuming you are only talking about Google's US homepage? (i.e. not
including youtube and other non google.com Google properties)?

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, but the 'US' homepage as you call it is used by people all over the
world.

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.

~~~
Raphael_Amiard
In france everybody uses google.fr. Not all countries and cultures are
comfortable with english.

~~~
jacquesm
Google.com is the #5 site in France.

~~~
Raphael_Amiard
Yeah sure, but what you fail to mention is that google.fr is #1 in france,
with 5 times more visits, which means that there is a big subset of fr users
that doesn't use google.com. Which was the original point.

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kasunh
I don't get this logic that because every social network before fb died so
will fb. We have to agree that fb understood the social networking landscape a
lot more than all other previous players. My guess is fb will not rule the web
but it is here to stay for a long long time

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hardik
How was the google line trending when it was 6 years old? I am sure the
acceleration of their traffic must have reduced over the past few years and
would expect similar thing to happen to facebook.

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cbright
"Whenever you're told that some existing statistical trend will continue, but
you aren't given a hard-to-vary account of what causes that trend, you're
being told a wizard did it." -David Deutsch

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VMG
An by 2050 both will have 500% market share!

~~~
jacquesm
Of course, because everybody knows you can extrapolate graphs past their
domains and that you do not need to take saturation in to account at all.

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whatwhatwhat
I believe the power of the goog will result in something that is more
asymptotic.

