Facebook: The Next Search? The Next Google?
There's little no argument that social network sites are the latest darling of the online marketplace. I mean, even the mainstream media is abuzz with social network gossip. One social network has excelled above the others, though, and Yahoo might be upping their bid for it because it can give them precisely the edge they need to pursue their new strategy of personalization.
In the world of social networks, there seems to be a progression toward niche networking. In the world of search, there seems to be a progression toward personalization. Can Facebook, then, give Yahoo what it needs to surpass Google? Can it be the next Google?
Facebook outright compells users to generate their own niches within the greater umbrela network. Another thing it compells users to do is use their real identities and profile themselves as much as possible. Indeed, you cannot take advantage of the network without doing so, and that enables them to develop user demographics that rival what Google can generate with your search history and Gmail.
While speculating on how Yahoo might be upping their rejected bid for the site of $1.65B to a rounder, more robust $2B, Search Engine Journal editor Loren Baker articulates the question we've all been begging to hear: are social networks going to be the next search engines. He writes:
Facebook has become the more mature version of the social networking boom caused by MySpace.
[...]
Combined, Facebook would give Yahoo that social network they’ve been shooting for all of this time and a major vehicle for Yahoo’s display, search and contextual advertising. [...]
Another bonus is that more and more young users are using social networks like MySpace and Facebook for the connections they used to keep via email. As those users mature, visits to webmail services like Yahoo Mail may decline.
If checking email is just as much as an important part of the Internet as search, and Yahoo and Google have both proven that email is a critical part of the web/search/media network structure, then the ability to keep up that trend via a Facebook acquisition of $2 Billion today may be seen as a bargain in 5 years.
The underlying point is that a Yahoo acquisition of Facebook could leave Google's personalized search and user-profiling efforts slated for the same fate as MySpace: facing extinction because the benefit so being the earliest adopter are out-weighed by being an imperfect beta-model. In other words, Facebook wouldn't only fit into Yahoo's latest strategy, but the manner in which it would do so would give Yahoo the kind of traffic and information it need to possibly surpass Google in the field of personalization.
If the future of search is indeed personalization, that might mean that the acquisition of Facebook would give Yahoo what it needs to meet Google eye-to-eye, and then possibly beat them. After all, Google's method of collecting user info is not nearly as effective. It relies on inferring their habits from the keywords in their searches and e-mails. Even if a complete profile could be assembled, it would take time and effort. With Facebook, on the other hand, users are coaxed into outright handing over that information. Indeed, this is the king of thing that would make the inventors of Air Miles both proud and envious.
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