Ben Ackles

Search powered by People’s Likes

Today, Mathew Ingram of GigaOM reported that Google is trying to build a “Facebook killer”. The rumor started when Kevin Rose tweeted (UPDATE: deleted) that he had a credible source telling him Google had plans to release a service called Google Me. The service is reported to have combined the features of many of (or all) the Google properties to build a formidable competitor to Facebook.

A little voice inside me, call it intuition tells me that Google will fail. I am not alone since the article, along with the rest of the blog echo-chamber say the same thing. I’ll explain why I think most people are missing the point of why Facebook succeeded and others will fail with these Google Me-too services.

Attract Real People

Facebook started out building in a closed ecosystem called academia. They built a robust community around an existing network of people who were assigned a 1-to-1 relationship with a .edu email address. Even though many people rejected the idea of closing off the service to people who were outside of college. They resisted growth at the risk of social value dilution.

People vs Organizations

Organizations are a different entity than people. Yet they exhibit many common characteristics and are always created and operated by people. Facebook made this a key component in the nature of the beast. For most of Facebook’s history they only allowed people to create profiles. As people (students) joined the workforce or became interested in representing brands or organizations, Facebook needed to make it possible for people to create pages. Pages were a representation of organizations, products, or public personalities. People had their own set of controls and pages had to be administered by people. Enter permission based marketing and a new way to interact with brands while giving the power to the people.

Constraints to Structure

MySpace allowed users for customized profiles, allowing users to butcher the brand and provide a faddish look only a 15 year old school girl would love. As you navigate throughout MySpace you are lost in a maze of glitter and garbage (mostly ads). MySpace was a place for people to express themselves through visual and audio noise; not content. Facebook on the other hand constrained people in a way that content became king and structure avoided the perils of fads. People found utility in Facebook and a faddish chaos over at MySpace. Game over MySpace!

Avoid Things You’re Not Good At

Facebook will not be a Zynga, Foursquare, or any other gaming killers; the product’s are too specific. Facebook wants to be a hub of shares and likes to create a social graph of the behavior patterns of people. Search has proven to be the greatest engine for profitable advertising. Facebook’s clearly positioned to capitalize on likes over links. Are we seeing the genesis of PageRank for likes?

Google on Social Search

I love Google. I think they are a transformative company. They have redefined what the modern multi-national corporation should look like. By most accounts they remain a very innovative company and exercise the strength of intrapreneurship. However, Google needs a long-term strategy, acknowledging that Facebook’s killer can’t be built overnight. Furthermore, they are probably not going to build the product in-house. The product will probably grow outside the walls of the Google Plex. I think their only concern should be on whether their core competency (search) will maintain the ability to index likes; not just links.

In a related post, I’ll argue what I think Facebook Connect is all about and why LinkedIn is missing the opportunity.

28 June 2010 · Comments