How Facebook Can Become Bigger In Five Years Than Google Is Today

Scary perspective. Once Facebook becomes the social layer in every application out there, they will become too powerful. And I don't think Diaspora is the solution (in its present form).

By the way, why isn't OpenSocial, OpenID, etc. getting traction outside the tech community?

this is the same crap we used to hear about myspace and friendster.

Techcrunch needs to lay off the crack...facebook might be a billion dollar company...it might even be a 2 billion dollar company...but there is no way it'd beat Google.

They compare it to Google revenues...but Google's ad product is a lot more effective. On Google the user is searching for widget, and Google tells them "hey widgets are 90% off at this site". With Facebook you are reading your friend's profile, and Facebook tells you "hey, I know you are busy, but this might possibly be of interest to you"

The rate of return is a lot worse with Facebook, because you can only target by demographics...not intent

To play devil's advocate here do you have any evidence that Google's model generates higher return, click thru or revenue?

To me it seems like Facebook is the best long term business model. Slowly, as you and your friends update every bit of your life, where you are, what you are doing, who you are with, etc. they can have a massive amount of data to target you with. Google basically made Gmail just so they could mine more data from your email to better target adverts. Facebook may have found the golden needle in the haystack if they evolve the business correctly which it looks like they will. Look where they are taking things with places, etc. Google can target you and the people who email you but there isn't a permanent link between you and the recipient(s) whereas with FB it is a chunky sold gold chain linking you together in every way they can think of from things you "like", wall posts, comments replying to you, comments you make, invites you get, invites you accept, places you go, who you go with, when you go, how much you spend, monitor you behaviour via status updates. They will know you go out every friday night with the same three friends to one of two bars or clubs, you then go and add photos to FB when you are there and label everyone in the pictures, the location either specifically or via geotag, etc.

Google may have a lot of your data but FB is the holy grail and every business needs to think about how they can get in on the action. Google tried with the piece of crap Buzz was and the crappy Orkut that they bought but let it die when FB exploded. Soon FB will be as well known as Coca Cola and used by everyone. FB is the first service my mum, dad, grandma, aunt, uncle, etc. use. It isn't just a "under 30s" thing, literally everyone can and seem to be using it. Facebook is going to only get bigger and they have such a high userbase now it is hard to see how anyone else will replace them. They saw what happened to MySpace, they are smart and have learnt from others mistakes.

Just my 2c though :)

It's true that Google has this advantage, but facebook has another one: "Hey, your friends x and y like these widgets".

I believe this is a failure of imagination. Facebook Credits will be their Gmail, the second act which shows that they are something special. Blippy, Groupon, and others are all in the general area of "social purchasing" but FB will simply dominate this when they enter the game. In a down economy, if you can get a discount by simply sharing or liking, you will. And advertisers can micro target not just demographics, but influencers within those demographics, people who are disproportionately effective in passing on memes -- and buy messages -- to their friends.

(Parenthetically, this also means people will visit Facebook for product search, buoying the overall commercial intent of the site. And an endorsement by a friend of something carries even more weight than a good Amazon reviews.)