Google vs Facebook (the department store vs marketplace)
Update: as evidenced by this report, on unique visitors to FB and Google, industry commentators still don’t get the difference between these two giant net companies. Equally, FB putting realtime search into its environment (acquiring FriendFeed) also doesn’t in any way demonstrate equivalence between the two. Both reflect a relatively simplistic understanding of the net as a place for searching and for getting lots of visitors. (Think, for example, of google search is embedded inside many applications and services – Google doesn’t need people to go to its hompage!)
Ultimately, reflecting on some twitter comments (thanks @baym and @amuir_netecol) from my last post , I am drawn to the comparison between Facebook as the massive department store within which all wants and desires are collected, strucutured and offered: some of the ‘departments’ are franchises, essentially leased from the main store, others are owned by the store. Just like department stores are designed to lure customers in, and make it hard to leave, with astute physical environments that prevent ‘walk through’, so too Facebook acquires as much of a user’s attention as possible and then distributes it across several applications, engagements and the like. While much of what is there is equivalent to each other, there is also a lot of care taken to avoid direct competition inside the store – there is one shoe department, not 10. Google is like a bazaar or marketplace in which there are numerous identical stalls and services all being offered at once, in a rowdy, complex way, built into the fabric of the town or city.
These are neither better or worse models for online living (though I know which I prefer personally): but they are very different, non-competing modes of online exploitation. Perhaps then it isn’t ever a question of Google vs Facebook: it’s another sign of the divergence in media models (channels, brands, etc) when they fall into the formless, malleable world of the Internet.