

The (Dark) Age of Facebook - danielzarick

I believe the next decade will be the "Age of Facebook" as Michael Arrington said over the weekend. Microsoft owned the 90's game, Google owned the 00's, and Facebook &#38; mobile technology will dominate the next decade. However, I have to admit, I feel quite differently about Facebook compared to Google or even Microsoft.<p>Personally, I rely on Google (Gmail, maps, docs, calendar, search, reader, chat, etc) on an hourly basis. Every so often I deactivate my Facebook account for a week or so at a time with absolutely no issues. My daily life would be much more challenging if I did the same for Google's products. Google's products increase my productivity, help me make money, to learn, to explore, and to lose myself in the wealth of the world's knowledge and information. Also, I have a trust with Google that Facebook has yet to convince me to have for them as well. Google has a higher cause, to organize the world's information. It seems like Facebook's higher cause is to control the internet and make a lot of money doing it.<p>With all that said... is there anything we can do to stop it? I'm worried that the primary internet entity for the next decade will not offer me an amount of value on par with the amount of control and power that they wield.
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A2Anonymous
Facebook and Twitter both have what Google doesn't, the "interest graph" -
Facebook knows what you like and Twitter knows what you like right now. We are
already seeing 3rd parties build products based on your interest graph, but
expect Facebook to continue to build products as well. One of the products
that I suspect they will move to the forefront is search. They will become a
direct competitor with Google, within the facebook environment. There are
already signs of them moving towards this with inclusion of Bing results.
Eventually these results could be catered based on interests rather than an
algorithm that weights websites based on backlinks and only your "search
terms" (IE: Google). Search terms + interest graph is a very powerful
algorithm - especially as Facebook deploys "like" buttons across the internet
which serve as "votes" similarly to how Google considers "backlinks" votes for
a website. Also, remember that Facebook did announce the integration of
Microsoft Office web apps within Facebook.

Things are getting interesting.

Facebook, while scary from a privacy standpoint, is definitely creating value
and will continue to create value.

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danielzarick
FYI- I posted this on my blog, but I don't have comments so I wanted to bring
the conversation to HN. [http://www.danielzarick.com/2010/04/the-dark-age-of-
facebook...](http://www.danielzarick.com/2010/04/the-dark-age-of-facebook/)

