Google should fear Facebook (CyKho @ O'reilly Graphing Social Patterns East Part 1)
I'm sitting here listening to Ro (Rogelio) Choy of Rock You give the basics of social networking for marketers. Most of the talk is fairly simplistic (we learned how to set up a Facebook profile) - however, one point he made was was fairly poignant:
Social networks are the new entry point to the Internet.
In the early days of the web, users use individual web pages as their entry point (first place I go when my browser opens). Soon this evolved to directories (just a list of webpages) and eventual searchable directories (ie Live Search/Google/Ask). Ro's primary point was the more and more we're seeing that the first thing users are doing is going to see their profile - and see what their friends are doing. The FIRST thing - their entry point. This means that users recognize a social network (say Facebook) as their launching point for the internet. So, every time they log in, they'll go to Facebook rather than Google. That means less eyeballs (and money) for search and more for the social.
As we see this shift I'm interesting in seeing more utilities (ie search/readers etc) built into social networks as opposed to search. If I'm going to Facebook already, wouldn't it be cool for me to be able to find websites, visit my favorite links, and see the weather from Facebook? I think that if a company can do this right, they can capture the eyeballs up stream from the search engines of the world - with better context (using data from the social graph). Google in trouble? Nah - all they have to do is make Orkut fly :)
