Why Facebook won't put Google out of business

I came across this interesting and well argued article the other day suggesting that Facebook could very easily put Google out of business. The reason, argues the author (Ben Elowitz, who is someone who knows a bit about online publishing), is that Facebook's treasure trove of social connections and 'likes' means it can place ads which are highly targeted to the user's tastes. Google can't do that, it can only target what you search on, so online advertisers will desert Google for Facebook, and its linked search engines, Bing and Yahoo!

Whilst its certainly true that being able to target the user's exact tastes provides an offering that must have advertsising professionals salivating, there are a couple of problems with this argument. The first is that, despite Mark Zuckerberg's talk about the social web and that in future you will follow your friends' recommendations rather than just searching for keywords, there is still a massive need for the ability to search on stuff that your friends might not know anything about. And while we'll start seeing the Facebook search function expanded from just friend searches soon, the company whose name has given us a verb meaning 'to search online' is not going to go away in a hurry, even ignoring it's Johnny-come-lately '+1' button. And where there are search results, keyword marketing (especially if it's informed by a user's search and click history) is still a very powerful tool.

But still, if this were the only thing in Google's arsenal, I'd be inclined to think Elowitz might be right. But I think the one thing missing from his argument is where Google's looking to expand, which is 'The Cloud', or running your software applications through a web browser rather than on your computer. Google is really leading the way in this. The Google Docs and Google Apps service has really pushed the boundaries, making it possible for the first time to have a serious business computer that only has a web browser on it (in fact, Google has just released a computer which is exactly that). Yes Microsoft has similar apps, but the thought leadership is really coming out of Mountain View. And Google's marketplace is also allowing innovative third party Cloud software providers to hook into Google Apps and get the marketing boost that goes with that.

With lots of Cloud software users, we are likely to see that users will spend an increasing proportion of their working life on Google, alongside the increasing proportion of their personal life spent on Facebook. And with lots of users using a service for a lot of time comes an opportunity to target marketing at people that Google knows quite a bit about.

So I would say that yes, we are seeing the rise of Facebook, but don't sound the death knell for Google just yet!