Fifteen years ago, we all assumed that either Coca-Cola or Disney would be the first corporation to take over the world. Five years ago, it was Google. However, it now looks like world domination will come from an even newer entrant: Facebook. In fact, it’s looking more and more like Facebook is positioning itself to do to Google in the 2010’s what it did to MySpace in the 2000’s.
The 2000’s saw the rise of online social networking, in which people could set up their own profiles and connect to other “friends” online. Friendster was the first network to really take off, and it was soon supplanted by MySpace, which in turn was soon overtaken by Facebook. Interestingly enough, MySpace seems to have reinvented itself as a vertical network geared toward music artists, as it is now still the go-to place for artists and bands looking to be discovered. Facebook, meanwhile, has become by far the largest online social network, boasting over 400 million active users. If it were its own country, it would be the third largest in the world population-wise, 33% bigger than the United States.
Google was established in the late 1990’s. Its innovation as a search engine was its method of searching. Whereas most conventional search engines of the time ranked results based on the number of times the search terms appeared on the page, Google set up a new system that analyzed the relationships between websites. This system, called PageRank, determines a website’s relevance by counting the number of pages that link back to a given site, and the importance of those pages, relying on “Googlebots,” or programs that automatically browse the internet looking for new pages, changes to pages, and new connections between pages. This system is what gave Google its competitive advantage over other search engines, propelled it to the top of the search industry, and helped it become the behemoth that we know and love today.
You may have seen how you can now log in to several third party (not Facebook) websites and applications using your Facebook identity, and “Like” stories from other websites such as CNN, Fox News, or Cracked, which then show up in your News Feed. What’s actually going on is that Facebook is relying on a principal called collective intelligence, or “crowdsourcing,” to crawl the internet for relevant pages and make them more easily accessible, in a way similar to Google’s bots. The difference is that Google relies on computer programs to algorithmically determine a given page’s relevance. Facebook, on the other hand, relies on its network of 400 million human beings, each equipped with human intuition and linked to an average of 130 friends, to comb the internet in search for useful and relevant pages. This gives Facebook a huge competitive advantage because computer logic is still no match for human intelligence and intuition. It’s still in the beginning stages, but I suspect that in the coming years we will begin to use Google less for our search needs and use Facebook instead.
Bottom line: if you think Facebook is huge now, you ain’t seen nothing yet!
Probably a third of that enormous population is a member of a group like 'We hate the new Facebook!' and yet...they still use it. There's an interesting article about this on cracked.com that basically predicts a dystopian future where Facebook rules the world.
ReplyDelete