• Tweet
• Sharebar

Facebook and Google, you’d think they were the same. They’re not.

In the next few paragraphs, if you can stick through this somewhat mundane and talked-to-death topic for a few minutes, I’ll spell out the exact reason why I hate Facebook, and why you should as well. Now, I know its a terrible thing to tell you how you should feel, no one can really do that, but genius marketers try all the time. I also know that it’s really none of my business what anyone online uses, as I don’t work for Facebook or Google, or actually anyone other than myself… So why do I care? Well, perhaps because this is mildly important, and I think that people are missing the boat or simply dismissing the boat.

This is serious business, people. So, please, stick through this post with an open mind. 

I hate Facebook

Before I get into why I hate Facebook, you should understand that I think it’s a well done service. They’ve done an amazing job at opening people up to the Internet, and have helped how people trust the web. They’ve helped make the Internet, itself, a common thing in the day-to-day, now more than ever. They didn’t do it alone; but they helped quite a bit.

I have family members on a website, that’s neat. I have old high school friends on a website, that’s also neat. More importantly, it’s not about who’s on a website, but what it took, via a fundamental shift, to get these people to actually join a website, and understand the abstracts associated with social-sharing on the Internet.

If Facebook was all fairy dust and unicorn utopia, aimed at building trust within humanity to get better at sharing on the Internet, however, they would promote the Internet. The fact is, Facebook isn’t a philanthropist aiming their hard spent time and efforts at simply making the world a better and more-open place. The single-most important fact that you need to understand is that Facebook generates Revenue, and not just from people applying to make Facebook apps.

Now, it’s not the Revenue that makes me hate Facebook. If I hated companies that existed online or the sole purpose of turning a profit, I’d have to hate Amazon, Pandora, online Publishers, half of the startup ideas I’ve come up with, and Google. This isnt’ about money, at all. It’s about the philosophy behind the money, where it’s pointed, and where it stops.

The Data

Facebook, like Google, has a huge vacuum cleaner attached to their website. This vacuum is out there sucking up anything and everything it can associate to a single datapoint. That datapoint is you, the user. What can be done with this data?

• Relational datapoint calculation: Point X is related to point A, and thus points within A and X are assumed to be related within certain limitations. If John likes “This Book” and Jane likes “That Book” and John and Jill know each other, perhaps there’s something there.
• Targeting: Maybe John will like “That Book” and Jill will like “This Book”, since they both read, they both went to coffee together three times last month.
• Retargeting: John mentioned lawnmowers earlier, and now he’s getting a message from Jim about lawnmowers, he must be interested in lawnmowers.

All this really does is make for a smarter, targeted experience. “Targeted” by the way is exactly what it sounds like, it’s the job of someone trying to sell something to find their sales-targets, the more the sales person knows, the tighter the bulls-eye they can paint.

The Result

In order for an online advertising product to be any good it has to have accurate data advertisers can buy. They need to have their user-base use their products. By using their products, they create a vastly complex data graph of what interests you within their products, and thus, hopefully, show you things that might be what you’re looking for.

Since Facebook only sells Facebook advertising that points to Facebook, Facebook uses this data to improve Facebook. I’ve said this once before, but this is how it works: Facebook gathers data to sell to advertisers, who want to advertise things on Facebook, and get the attention of people on Facebook, and thus, drive Facebook traffic to Facebook pages that promote other Facebook users, apps, profiles, brands, etc. This doesn’t mean people can’t go to sites outside of Facebook once they land on a page from an ad they clicked in Facebook, but fact of the matter is this: This is the sole driver behind every single feature that exists on Facebook.

In order for Facebook to make more money from Facebook they need:

1. More data points, from you about you (including who you know, what they like, and where you go together) – hence the Timeline
2. If you’re not explicitly giving Facebook data, they’ll just take it via the Open Graph

How is this different from Google?

This is the absolute, easiest question to answer. It might seem difficult at first, I mean, they both do data mining. They both develop products that people simply “must” use. They’ve both positioned themselves on the Internet in a way we all have grown to openly trust and freely give our information to in trade for the plethora of services they offer to us at “no cost”.

So what is it?

1. A very large majority of Google revenue comes from promoting sites that aren’t Google (via AdSense, Google Search, etc)
2. Google is as only as good as the Internet, and it takes us all to make it better.
3. Google is thus dedicated to releasing products that help Everyone on the Internet make the web better (+1 button, Shares, etc)

That’s It

Facebook is a selfish, ego-centric, greedy blackhole of the Internet. I can’t stand it. It does nothing for the web without thinking of itself first, and is laughing all the way to the bank because we don’t care what they do, as long as we can post pictures of our cat all day and have our mom “Like” it.

Google enables people to create, grow and improve the Internet. They’re not the end-all and holier-than-thou, but at least when they release projects, they do it from the basis of “champions for a better Internet”  in mind, not simply “champions for a better way to mine more of your data so we can make more money”.

09.22.11 • posted in: Technology