Recently, I had to teach the Facebook case along with the Google case on the same day, as examples of commerce platforms. In many ways they are both similar and quite different in other. Almost everyone in the online world use these two sites. They are both highly successful companies with a strong engineering culture trying to attract from the same talent pool. Both companies have spent a great deal of money on building a flexible and adaptive infrastructure. This allows them to quickly develop, test, listen and iterate their products. Google and FB are able to build their products fast and test user experiences on the same infrastructure. They both fulfil a major user need for free search for information and make money from third-parties.
Facebook. mission is to make the world more open and connected. This allows users to connect and learn about new things from their social network. Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible. People like to search and get instant answers to questions. Their mission statements cause them to look at the world differently. Google believes in the power of searching user generated information using sophisticated algorithms and powerful computers. Facebook, on the other hand, believes that every single service you use will be better when used with your social network. Wisdom of friends trumps wisdom of crowds. This results in Facebook creating products and services that allow people to exercise their core desire to express who they are and wanting to know what is going on with the people they care about. Google is more interested in gathering content and indexing them.
Their business models, while dependent on marketers for revenue, approach the solution from different directions. Marketers want to be found. Facebook uses referrals from friends to find and serve information. Google uses algorithms to search and find. Google is algorithms and machine learning while FB is relationships and information flows.
They are both huge threats to privacy. While they try to put in place policies that allow users to stay in control of their information, many unintended consequences have occurred. Facebook updates and Google's Street View have caused many privacy violations. Facebook has been pushing the boundary on what is acceptable. When faced with a backlash, they have rectified their policies. At the end, they both sit on huge treasure troves of user data that could one day be mined for commercial purposes.
Both have created a filter bubble. The information that we see is determined by what the search algorithms find from the sources that they cover in the case of Google. In the case of FB, the filter bubble is created by the friendship network.
Overall, we came out with the understanding that they compete on many fronts for user attention and third-party advertisers, but have different philosophies on information retrieval. In fact, social search may end up complementing algorithmic search.