Matthew Allen

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.

I commented recently on Twitter that Facebook = the new AOL and, not surprisingly, then discovered that many others (e.g. Kottke.org had already had my apparently novel insight! (This effect can either deflate one’s confidence or increase it – I am not the first, but I am as wise as the crowd – some examples from the crowd thanks to googlesearch). And, clearly, Facebook is trying to create an experience of online life / augmented reality / social and cognitive networking that stands apart from, or is potentially isolated from the ‘web’ within which Facebook exists – though it claims to be embedding itself into the web, of becoming a sort of underlying social networking of people, data and places throughout the web, I actually see the plan as one to enable its users to never leave the facebook environment except when prompted to do so by something in facebook, and then be returned to facebook. So, in this model of online behaviour, Facebook users would look out over the low walls of the garden and observe interesting things elsewhere in the jungle of the net; would at times scurry out into that jungle, but otherwise would remain safely inside the habitat of Facebook. As Siliconbeat reports, Google should be worried about this new wave of Facebook’s expansion of the way it will encompass online behaviours into a single space: communities that serve Facebook.

There’s a real sense of imperialism about Facebook. Sure we worry about the approach to privacy (see Raynes-Goldie, First Monday and the casual manner in which Facebook treats its users, by changing rules on them, making them feel (and indeed be) disconnected from their data bodies. But what worries me more, at this stage, is how Facebook is attempting to exploit more and more of the Internet for its marketing purposes (through the ‘like’ function, and by embedding internet affordances into its environment) and to claim that what matters in information acquisition and production is what is liked, or networked, between its users. (note too – Facebook acts as if everyone online is a Facebook user – a lot of them just don’t know it yet). So the challenge we face in responding to Facebook and its extraordinary (and network-effect growing) power is not how Facebook works in its own terms (after all, one can opt out, to some extent, if you don’t like it), but how it acquisitively eyes the Internet as the source of the raw informational material which it needs to sustain itself.

Google has an equally imperial view of information – witness the book digitisation issue, the constant acquisition of individual online behavioural data. What I find interesting to consider, though, is the difference between how these two behemoths of the online world approach their activities. Google achieves its empire (an empire of mind and data) by networking diverse nodes together – there is, really, no one place where Google ‘is’ and can be found / managed or located. Googlemaps tells us that Google is everyone and nowhere all at once. Note how Facebook is absolutely locatable – it’s all about what happens inside that Facebook environment (content brought into that space); Google is all about what happens everywhere else (but monitored by Google). And, while Google ‘profiles’ us when we sign up for its services (and even when we don’t), there is one key component of most online activities which we don’t find through Google – the public profile. Google is, truly, ‘faceless’ book – except that your face is very clear to google, if you choose to embrace its multitude of data services.

Facebook, then, strikes me as the inheritor of Yahoo!’s location in the web-world of the 2000s – a place for ‘us’ to form networks; the networks are a consequence of accepting what we give up when we use Facebook. Google is the service where the network is t he starting point: the network of data, the networking of us within the infoverse of the Internet. While Facebook might be viewed as a force for the enclosure of the net, as a company that seeks control (and market profitability) through a very explicit presence, an overlording curator of those within its domain, Google – equally potent – disperses itself throughout the Internet; invisibility, implicitness and distributed power work for this company.

Since both of them are searching, in the end, for revenue streams from advertising , Facebook and Google compete (though Facebook is far less pervasive, less successful in those terms). But the competition is not just for ‘who wins the most revenue’: like most deep struggles within capitalism, Facebook and Google are engaged in a kind of ideological struggle to define the Internet in ways which (in the minds of users) will constrain and shape the Internet’s future. So, in years to come, will the Internet be – largely – seen and used inside the low walls of Facebook’s crowded gardens? Or will it be itself the garden, and Google a kind of viral thread interwoven with its every use?