Started at harvard six years ago by Mark Zuckerberg and his team Facebook has come to quite a long distance to be what it is now. Its been nearly a month since the first time Facebook surpassed Google with the most number of US visits. There’s already statistics that Facebook has almost 40% of the entire social media traffic. To add to that Facebook boasts a humongous 400 million plus user base and its still increasing at a rapid rate and its just 2010. Facebook now stands at a very crucial stage and my god they do have ambitious plans. Facebook has enough user base that it can start crawling the web, page by page using its users as crawlers like how Google crawls the web using a googlebot. Thats how i perceive the new Like feature (or social plugins) they launched at the Facebook F8 Summit. Its difficult to imagine the web with Facebook written all over it. May be down the lane Facebook alone will be the gateway to the web, in the sense u look at sites which facebook suggests, you buy stuff using Facebook account, you go places in real world which Facebook suggests.Almost all your decisions would influenced by Facebook. There would be literally no anonymity on the web, all your activities would be tracked down to your Facebook profile. Facebook’s ambitions are really big and fragile. Scoble has a detailed post (must read post) about the media reactions and how the changes would influence the web. Google already felt the threat from Facebook and did launch buzz in spree and made a mess of it. Guess Google needs to try harder. The kind of volume which Facebook is growing into is too big and critical. Facebook already has enough data about us that influence our daily life considerably. I just wish and hope they don’t misuse the freedom and power and lose our trust. I wonder if Facebook become’s the next Google in terms of the traffic stats and revenues they would generate, then what kind of company would emerge to challenge Facebook. What kind of interaction would mankind look forward from the web. What could be the Next Big thing on the WEB. Do you have any clue?
Tag: Social
Gmail greeted me this morning with a new Buzz. The Gmail blog told the entire story of Google launching a yet another SOCIAL Feature called the Buzz. Google Buzz is among the very crucial moves which Google has been playing to sustain its dominance in the web especially the social web.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi50KlsCBio]
Google Buzz
The Buzz is a lifestreaming service more like the FriendFeed where all your activities on the various social sites get aggregated at one place facilitating a much broader picture of your digital echo. I won’t help you guys with the features, coz the video is easier to follow. Interesting again with the cartoon showing up in a google’s product launch similar to Google Chrome in 2008. What would make the Google Buzz even more competitive would be an integration of the Google Wave along with updates from Google groups and more socail sites into it. Facebook is not yet a Lifestreaming service, but they did acquire FriendFeed. (I am not still sure what their plans with FriendFeed are)
Facebook recently had its 6th anniversary and hit the 400 million user mark, But Google buzz will already start off with over a 150 million(approximately) user base owing to the fact that its built right into Gmail. What Google Buzz lacks is the all the social games and the apps that people use on Facebook. I guess once an API for the Google Buzz is out, it will go head on against Facebook. As yet it too early to say who will kill Facebook, but Google Buzz definitely has potential.
UPDATE: Google has just updated few new changes to the way how BUZZ works. Head over here to read more and understand on the modifications.