Facebook The New Internet
December 29th, 2010 | by Jen |Facebook is challenging Google’s supremacy on the internet with a radically different approach to how people live, work, play and search online.
While Google delivers search results selected by algorithms that take into account a user’s web history, Facebook boasts a richer level of personalisation based on one’s own “likes” and the recommendations of Facebook friends.
Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in his Harvard University dorm room six years ago and is now worth an estimated $US6.9 billion, refers to it as the “social graph.”
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“I think what we’ve found is that when you can use products with your friends and your family and the people you care about they tend to be more engaging,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with the CBS show 60 Minutes.
“The social graph is incredibly broad,” said Wedbush Securities social media analyst Lou Kerner, picking up on Zuckerberg’s favorite phrase. “It includes not only what you do and what you like but people you know and what they like and the companies you interact with.”
For some internet watchers like Kerner, Facebook is constructing a parallel network built around the interactions of its more than 500 million members.
“I refer to Facebook as the second internet, maybe more valuable than the first because we’re all interconnected on it,” Kerner told AFP.
“Social media is an increasingly important part of how you reach people and it’s a growing part of every marketer’s budget,” he said.
“The idea is you do not want to fight Facebook, you want to embrace Facebook and leverage Facebook because this is where people are going to spend increasing amounts of time,” he said.
According to online tracking firm comScore, Google receives more unique monthly visitors than Facebook but visitors to Facebook spend more time at the site than they do on Google properties.
Since early 2010, Facebook has been rolling out features which put it on a collision course with Google - an @facebook.com email service which competes with Google’s Gmail and “Facebook Questions,” a search engine of sorts which lets Facebook members ask questions and get answers from other members.