Google And Facebook War To Win The Long-Tail And Your Mind.

Posted on 06. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci in Trends

Social networks are quickly morphing from destination to distributed networks around data, aka sites (the “shared” interests) and like-minded people. It’s not a user-driven innovation. The drivers of this (r)evolution are economic, and both Facebook and Google are upping the ante of the game, in the hope to be the ones who know you better, i.e. influence and make advertising money out of you.

If Facebook has a clear advantage in terms of consumer adoption and existing social network functionalities, Google has the power of existing business relationships with millions of site owners through AdSense, and a sophisticated advertising platform that monetizes users’ intentions and behaviors. Its roadmap is therefore focused on piecing together existing or new social networks features. in order to make the world wide web its social network advertising net.

A chronology of the facts.

FACEBOOK

The Big Allies Phase

In December of 08, after months in beta, Facebook Connect launches to the public. Big brands jump on board: from Hulu to Xbox Live to Nintendo DSi.
After only 6 months, Zuckerberg already hints at the strategic role of Facebook Connect in its conquest of both the world and of a viable business model. He admits that serving ads on third-party sites and becoming an alternative PayPal are the next steps in the “Facebook” wide web.

The Conquest of the Long Tail

In September 2009, Facebook launches Connect Wizard and Playground. The integration of Facebook Connect is now dummy-proof.
November 2009 -OpenGraph API. Announced last week, Facebook OpenGraph API will allow site owners and brands to export the functionalities of a Fan Page inside their site. For example, AwesomeTees might decide that strategically they would like to locate their brand identity at www.awesometees.com. AwesomeTees will install the Fan Box widget, which will allow any Facebook user to “Become a Fan” of AwesomeTees, thereby establishing an official connection to AwesomeTees. The user will then have AwesomeTees listed in their list of connections on their profile as Pages are represented today. Additionally, any content that AwesomeTees publishes on AwesomeTees.com will show up in the stream on Facebook like it normally would. And, any time the user searches on Facebook, AwesomeTees will show up in the typeaheads and prominently in search results.
As part of the API roadmap – which is public!- Facebook announces its plans to allow users to share their email address with developers and brands.

GOOGLE

The Google Social Network Expansion

April 2009 –> Building Profiles - Starting from the foundations of a social network, in April Google launches Google Profiles, an evolution of the rudimentary Google profile pages. The new profiles are presented as a way for people to tell the world who they are and claim their identity in Google’s main search results.
September 2009 –> Communication – What good are profiles if users can not talk to each other? Sure there is Gtalk, but with the new “SideWiki” users can now contribute comments about any webpage.
November 2009 – >Sharing- Unlike the Facebook sharing, an endless and hardly filtered stream of facts and applications’ spam, Google wants to make sharing relevant. by allowing users to find what their friends have to say right when they need that information, i.e. inside search results. Sharing is indeed dubbed as Social Search.
November 2009 –>Privacy – No social networks can gain any tractio,n if users don’t think that they’re in control of the privacy setting. Easy said, easy done. The new Privacy Dashboard aggregates your privacy setting and lets you control what is shared or sharable or private.

The Google Friend Connect March

December 2008–Launched almost simultaneously to Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect is a set of tools that integrate social networking tools and widgets to any site.
November 2009 –Already strong of 9 million sites, Google announces a number of new features that center on collecting and utilizing information about a site users’ interests. The main ones:
- Profiling users: now site owners can add their own polls when signing up new customers through Google Friend Connect
- Newsletters: the same interface offers an easy wizard to send custom newsletters to your customers.
- Monetization: Linking your Friend Connect account with your Ad Sense account will also enable ads displayed on your site to be more personalized to your site or even a particular user’s interests.
- Data Insights: While Friend Connect offers data visualization options, the interest thing is that it can be exported for further analysis or integrated with other third-party services.