Facebook AND Google. Not Facebook v/s Google!

Google and Facebook are arguably two of the world’s most influential web companies. Per Alexia’s traffic ranking, Google.com comes first followed by Facebook. Both companies also seem to have similar manifestoes and vision. Per Facebook’, it empowers people to share and make the world a more open and connected place. On the other hand, Google’s founders have always maintained that Google’s philosophy was to make the world’s information more accessible and better organized so that users could get exactly what they searched for. Unfortunately, both these web giants don’t seem to be playing well to each other and for whatever it’s worth, millions of consumers like you and I lose out the most. I mean if Facebook and Google were really true to both their philosophies, wouldn’t they have found a way to co-operate with each other to make the search for and the access to information more effective and better?

Google and Facebook weren’t always at war with one another. Most company insiders claim that Google’s launch of OpenSocial and getting other social networks committed to it in 2007 was the trigger point. Facebook also spurned an investment offer from Google also in 2007 about a week before the OpenSocial announcement and went ahead with a Microsoft investment in it for USD 240 million (technically speaking Microsoft may have actually outbid Google). And then of course everything went downhill from there on. 

It’s unfortunate because I see so many areas where Facebook and Google could have co-operated better to the benefit of its consumers. For one, Facebook’s integration into the Android platform is much below par if compared with its integration into the Apple iPhone platform. In fact, if you went back 3 years, Facebook had decided on not dedicating even a single resource for working on an application for the Android platform despite Google offering to loan a programmer to Facebook for this very purpose.  Another area where I would have loved to see
more collaboration is on my ability to see, track and interact with my Gmail contacts on Facebook and vice-versa without requiring the export of contacts from one platform to another. That way I could get to leverage the power of both platforms while using only of them. And that’s true for most of Google’s other platforms such as Youtube, Picassa and more importantly Google documents. Also I would have liked for Google maps integration with Facebook places. Upon posting a location update on Facebook, I would like for it to tell me what places my friends have found interesting in this location before and use Google maps to help me navigate to these places of possible interest. 

There’s a lot that’s also possible between these two players as far as social search is concerned. Google Plus already incorporates search results from my friend’s blogs. If we could also incorporate results from my friend’s Facebook content onto here then I could actually find out more information that may be actually relevant to me. Today about 150 million people visit a Facebook page from a Google search result. But the search on and indexing of Facebook pages is restricted to only a small set of pages. 

In summary, I feel that this isn’t a winner takes all game like its being made out to be. Facebook is great at social and Google is great at search. If we can see some more collaboration between the two, we would be substantially increasing the value of the pie for everyone and the end consumers like you and I would be greatest winners.