Google Taking Blows - Facebook Retaliates
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Announcer: Facebook took a wallop in that last round Joe. How do you think they'll respond?
Analyst: It's going to take a lot of heart. They're going to have to dig deep into their bag of tricks just to regain some of the leverage they had earlier in the fight.
Announcer: Thanks Joe. The next round is about to start, so let's get you back to the action.
DING, DING
On November 6, 2007, Facebook announced its own social ad network just days, depending on where you look, after Google unveiled OpenSocial. "Facebook Ads" will be different from Google's AdSense in that advertisers will be able to target a user's individual profile data instead of the text on a given web page. Businesses will be able to create their own Facebook pages, allowing users to interact with them directly. In addition, these pages will spread virally just like a Facebook application and give businesses an opportunity to gather valuable user information.
This new feature can only be used on people with a Facebook account, whereas Google's AdSense can be utilized with anyone on the Internet. Obviously, there is quite a difference in the sheer percentage of the market reached through each service, but 60 million users is nothing to sneeze at, and clients will be hoping that advertising through a social network will result in a higher response rate.
Facebook has also countered the OpenSocial project by announcing that other social networks will be able to license its API technology so that Facebook applications can operate on other networks. According to Nick O'Neill, a Facebook blogger, "If other social networks adopt the Facebook platform, it will be a massive blow to Google. So who will the competition decide to partner with: Google or Facebook?" Bebo, which is very popular internationally, is the biggest social network to sign on to the project so far.
And who knows whether OpenSocial will even pan out. With numerous APIs now available for use, OpenSocial is on the verge of becoming lost in the clutter. Not scheduled for release until early 2008, OpenSocial is already well behind Facebook's platform in terms of how many developers are already familiar with its markup language. According to Facebook, over 100,000 developers have already collaborated so far.
However, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research believes that in the end, this may all be a waste of time. "Applications will never work the same over any community...every community has different technographics (the hardware, software, and code used) and different demographics. To expect that one widget will work cleanly over all platforms is overoptimistic," he says.
It's too soon to say whether OpenSocial has backfired for Google, but clearly they are feeling the heat from a competitor that knows their way around the social networking neighborhood. The last section will explore the problems that have cropped up for Google regarding its recent deal with DoubleClick.
Next: Google/DoubleClick Revisited >>
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