Facebook vs. Google: Why Facebook is Succeeding

Today’s NY Times article on Facebook’s rapid success in global reach serves to show that the battle between Google and Facebook is in full swing. Google beat out Microsoft and Yahoo! in search and now it faces an even bigger threat from Facebook.

Google has failed lately with every attempt to become a “social network” to tie in it’s search strength. Given our research we spend a lot of time looking at these two, amongst many others. I see pluses and minuses to both these companies and their services. Here’s why I think Facebook will lead the social network battle, unless Google thinks in similar ways.

Facebook is a little like AOL was 12+ years ago – a closed network aiming to provide content. AOL died because people prefer to decide on what they want to do and see online.  What Facebook provides is simply a “framework” making it easy for people to shape their “content experience” in the same way humans behave offline in groups. Facebook fits well into human social interactions. Google does not.

Google is all about “open” and in this sense is “non-linear”. Buzz is an interesting service concept, but it’s not that easy to use. It takes a fair bit of effort to figure out. Facebook does not. It’s more complex to move about Googles services, they don’t “combine” easily. I’m a huge fan of GoogleApps, and they’ve done well with how you can manage and access GoogleDocs. If they took that approach into a social networking format, they may do better.

But the biggest challenge Google faces now with regard to Facebook is portability of peoples networks. People don’t have the time for multiple social networks. Once they build their profile and connect with people they want to connect with, it’s done. If Google finds a way to “import” all your Facebook data, including all your friends, fan pages, groups pages and such, then they may have a hope. That is unlikely however. There will need to be a a very compelling reason to switch. The switching cost is just too high for the average consumer.

Google made a huge mistake with Buzz – they assumed everybody wants to connect with everybody. They don’t. Most people connect with only those they want to; friends, family, co-workers. In the Gen X to Lost Generation segments, they don’t randomly add people. They tend to cultivate the relationships they have. Millenials will quickly and easily add people to their network, but they restrict carefully who they closely communicate with.

There are over 100 cultural, ethnic or nationalist oriented social networks around the world. Facebook is getting people to move over. How? I’m not sure, but they’re doing it. Perhaps because of how well Facebook provides a framework for people to work from?

This battle for eyeballs and consumer time will be an interesting one. Google has some phenomenal resources in terms of human smarts at it’s disposal and now so does Facebook. For now though, when it comes to massive global penetration of social networks however, I’ll put my money on Facebook.