How Google Is Secretly Building Its Facebook Killer

Business Insider's Silicon Alley Insider:

Facebook knows who you are, who your friends are, and just about everything you and your friends "like" -- to read, to buy, to look at -- on the Internet.

This scares the pants off Google.

To Valley and tech types, Facebook's collection of data is known as the "social graph."

The reason it worries Google is that increasingly, Facebook is using that data to show users things to read, buy, and do on the Internet before those users get the chance to Google search for those things.

The social graph turns the Internet into Facebook's platform, not Google's.

Again -- that worries Google silly. As it should.

So, what is Google doing about it?

Read the whole story: Business Insider's Silicon Alley Insider

Comments

[Oregonian76]

11:25 AM on 05/12/2011

Facebook beat MySpace because they simplified the interface and made their site generally cleaner & easier to look at. Regardless of what you think of Facebook, they do have one of the best designed websites on the internet. There are some small things they could improve or add, but it's one of the most user-friendly sites you'll ever come across.

Google is going to have to do something that makes users feel like Facebook is a "hassle" to interact with to affect real change. Privacy concerns around Facebook only matter to a very small handful of people (and to no one that actually spends any time actually managing their settings), so that's not going to be the avenue.

[macewan]

06:01 AM on 05/12/2011

Google sat on their asses too long.

[JohnnyAce Okeke]

04:19 AM on 05/12/2011

The real Facebook killer would be for Google to buy Facebook. Problem solved. {{-_-}}

[sprouts]

02:09 AM on 05/12/2011

This is a stupid title for an even stupider article!

[jsarets]

11:09 PM on 05/11/2011

Google said like a year and half ago that if Facebook wouldn't let their Web spiders crawl their social network, then they'd find another way to reach in and get at the data.

Thanks to Facebook, Amazon, etc., people are used to giving up information in exchange for "better service". So Google simply asks their users: "Hey, would you please give us access to your Facebook account so that we can improve your search results?" And, voilà, they get the data they wanted.

They didn't have to do anything but ask people to turn it over willingly.

[Ipadroid nterface]

10:24 PM on 05/11/2011

Both companies are owned and operated by the United States Government. I love the genius of our intelligence agencies. They really created a system in which the people give them everything they need to know. Gotta love it!!!

[mlambush]

10:02 PM on 05/11/2011

Some secret....

[KMFIX]

09:59 PM on 05/11/2011

Not sure which company is more evil. They want to own and sell your personal information.

Never use your real name or info on any of these social websites.

[Valerio della Porta]

06:41 PM on 05/11/2011

If you read the article you realize that Google isn't building anything. They are just adding a social graph to the index by scraping existing information.

[jimmygeewhiz]

06:37 PM on 05/11/2011

It's not about the people that use or buy their product, it's not about dedication and respect to those that made the companies what they are, It's all about mining personal data, then sell it to the highest bidder. This is truly a buyer beware scenario.

[jflorish]

06:16 PM on 05/11/2011

First to market wins, Google lost ..... no way all those users are suddenly going to change, thats the way Microsoft was thinking about all the web "ideas" they tried.

[jsarets]

11:01 PM on 05/11/2011

More usually, second to market wins:

MySpace... then Facebook.
AltaVista... then Google.
Mac... then Windows.

[jflorish]

11:16 PM on 05/11/2011

All beaten by better products at the time. Hard to be better then Facebook, they have everything.

[David Knowles]

02:22 AM on 05/12/2011

I disagree with this, and there are many improvements which could be made to Facebook. Social interactions are primitive, the games are limited in scope and lack any social aspects at all. cant add people to a conservation. An i sure there are many more I could think of, instant message history.

[gevan]

04:50 PM on 05/11/2011

It's not as if anyone actually buys anything that advertises on the web is it?

[jflorish]

06:17 PM on 05/11/2011

I have. Although not everyone needs to buy something, advertising is also getting you to look at something because it registers the product in your mind. It works or the companies wouldn't spend so much money to do it.

[French Toast]

03:53 PM on 05/11/2011

I don't see how any of this is going to kill facebook.