Google at their best. Facebook at their best.

by razin • 15 years ago

75 15 15 years ago

racbart• 15 years ago

Facebook is so much younger than Google so it's a bit unfair to compare them this way. Facebook is still in such a crazy growth so they simply focus on their core business.

Google started launching their great non-search products (maps, mail) around 2004-2005 when it was at the same age as Facebook is today. And these products were or turned out to be supportive to their core search business as well. There were another couple of years before we've seen some great technologies from Google which weren't supposed to support their search business. So please, give Facebook couple more years before you judge.

Technical problems that Facebook solves in building and scaling their platform are enough challenging to require and attract the best minds in the industry. Let's see what these people will do when the dust settles a bit.

That said, I'm across the globe from the action and know nothing about these companies culture or attitude. But I still wouldn't judge Facebook yet.

lukeschlather• 15 years ago

The thing is that Facebook has already started branching out, and they're doing it wrong. When Google started adding things, your account was secondary, and the tool was first. Most of the tools to this day can be used with or without any sort of registration.

Facebook in contrast seems desperate to retain users. Nothing they create is useful without a Facebook account. Rather than pushing out the best products they can, they rely on the strength of vendor lock-in as a crutch.

I'm not even saying this is necessarily the result of some evil plan to take over the web. It's just that when you have the kind of lock-in they have you're loathe to give it up, and it makes you lazy since there are lots of places where you have nothing to measure yourself against but your previous performance.

nooneelse• 15 years ago

> "Facebook in contrast seems desperate to retain users. ..."

As well they should be. Born by, and live by, the social network, die by the social network. "You still using the old Facebook?" said with derision by the cool kids is probably what echos in their nightmares. Not the name Diaspora.

rospaya• 15 years ago

The comparison doesn't make much sense.

Google has a wide range of services in multiple fields, while Facebook has a single product, a social networking platform.

pdenya• 15 years ago

I read it as comparing the companies by the problems they choose to solve. What Facebook has been doing lately with Q&A and places is similar to the branching out that Google started doing a few years ago.

barmstrong• 15 years ago

I think that is part of the problem he was trying to point out.

Apocryphon• 15 years ago

True, but Google started as a single product: a search engine.

stanmancan• 15 years ago

Great article and relatively well timed. While it kind of seems like there can only be "one" internet giant at a time, and with Facebook "catching up" to Google, they are fundamentally very, very different companies. Clearly there will be some overlap, like with Gmail and Facebook messages, but considering Google's focus is technology and Facebook's is the social graph there's plenty of room for both of them to continue to flourish.

I still hate Facebook though.

diziet• 15 years ago

Is there a reason why the font/css settings on that page make it practically impossible to read the text?

seancron• 15 years ago

What wrong with it? It looks perfectly readable to me.

Raphael• 15 years ago

I zoomed to 172%.

zandorg• 15 years ago

I guess if Facebook uses their huge valuation to buy startups which use Facebook's API, they don't have to invent their own products, and thus they make income by buying those startups which DO turn a profit.

random42• 15 years ago

Buying profitable startups requires lot of money. Just buying them and living off their profits, wont be sustainable.

davcro• 15 years ago

Back in the day, I had a Facebook app called Quiz Monster that was utilized by lots of people all over the world. The app had international appeal because quizzes could be written in any language. For fun I coded an internal translation app heavily inspired by Facebook translations. I would type in an English phrase, select a target language. Then user's of that target language would see a dialog box asking "Do you speak english?" If they clicked yes they would be asked to translate the english phrase into their native language. After 25 submissions the program would stop prompting users. This usually took less than 5 seconds. The end result was a list of 25 translations of said phrase. I found the submissions far more reliable than Google Translate and used them to translate my app into many many languages.

mda• 15 years ago

I don't see what you are trying to say. Google translate is a machine translator, it could be less accurate, but it scales very well. It is probably translating millions of pages per day. You are comparing a system to generate voluntary translators for your quiz application to Google translate, these things are very different and technology wise Google translate is a few orders of magnitude more complex.

Google at their best. Facebook at their best.

Related Stories