Competing with Facebook
Who are Facebook’s biggest competitors?
Go ahead, list them – MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn. Then comment on how Facebook has left them in the dust with its 350 million members.
Jeremiah Owyang made an interesting comment last week at the panel on social media, saying that Facebook’s biggest competitor is Google. That’s because, he says, Google now allows you to create a profile.
Certainly, Owyang makes a point. Google is the number one site in terms of internet traffic, with a powerful grip on search marketing and a profitable business model (something Facebook still lacks). Here is the latest Alexa internet traffic graph for the top 5 sites–in order: Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, and MSN. Alexa graphs show percent of internet traffic, not actual usage numbers.
While Facebook’s strong growth is apparent over the two year period, Google’s growth trend is impressive too, and they are clearly maintaining or increasing their lead over the rest of the crowd. (As a side note, isn’t that an interesting uptick in traffic in the last month? While I’d like very much to think it’s a sign of the economic rebound-no such uptick is evident last Christmas—the cynic in me thinks it’s probably an Alexa adjustment.)
Google is also impressive in their breadth of offerings. Of course, they own YouTube, so take the #1 site and the #4 site and lump them together. Then consider that Google competes not just in search, but in email, office applications, analytics, advertising, mapping, location-based services, online payment processing—and many other things too.
Google product list.
Profiles
The one thing not listed here is Profiles. While Google has offered profiles for over a year, they seem to be unclear on what to do with them, and they certainly aren’t promoting them in an effort compete with Facebook.
Not that creating profiles isn’t a popular move these days. In addition to my Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, Evite is now trying to get me to fill in a profile, as well as Yahoo! and others. And Salesforce’s newly announced Chatter appears to be borrowing most of their features from Facebook, although at least I hear you can import from Facebook so you don’t have to recreate something new.
So Is Google a Threat to Facebook?
One thing I’ll say for Google—they compete creatively. When they started, no one had any idea search could be so big. Who would have thought of Google Earth? Who would have the vision to try to index all books, in and out of print? My guess is that if Google takes Facebook head on, it won’t be by using profiles to create something similar to Facebook. It will be something completely different that comes out of left field that leaves Facebook in the dust. Maybe Google Wave? What do you think?
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Google Wave is more of a collaboration tool at this point. There aren’t any ways to categorize your contacts, the with:public stream is too fast to compete with Twitter (too many conversations even if you break it down with lang:en ) Finding people is nearly impossible unless you know they are on. There’s no notification if you have a wave reply waiting for you.
I use Wave for collaboration only. Have tried it for networking – doesn’t really work unless I’m already connected to the person and want to – wait for it – collaborate.
So if they are working Wave to compete with FB – they need to add a lot of functionality and educate a lot of consumers to their new way of working. Too much of it is like a developers coding tool where you can see the versioning. If you don’t code, this isn’t intuitive. While I don’t know how Wave will end up – it doesn’t seem like competing with FB is the route Google is after.
My 2 cents.
Thanks, Shira, for sharing with us from the perspective of a beta user! I agree, it seems like Google isn’t really headed in that direction. But if anyone has the size and creativity to do it, Google seems the likely candidate. Guess we’ll have to stay tuned and see