Social Struggles & Facebook Fiefdoms

Movers and shakers and substantial tremors as social networks jostle for dominance…

Google+, which launched recently, is the latest volley from the behemoth in its efforts to battle with its similar-sized foe, Facebook. Time will tell whether it will encounter the same fate of the much-ballyhooed Buzz and Wave. Google is entering murky waters as it comes under scrutiny from Federal Trade Commission in the US, as well as the European Commission, for any anti-competitive activity. It is, increasingly, spreading its wings to areas previously considered far outside its remit. In some cases, such news is welcome, as when The Economist recently reported on the Summit Against Violent Extremism, “arranged by Google Ideas”. Importantly, the network effects of Googling are nothing compared to the network effects of Facebook, at least for now.

Meanwhile, Facebook announced “something awesome” this past week, which turned out to be the somewhat underwhelming news of group chat and video chat functionality, the latter a product of a collaboration with soon-to-be Microsoft’s Skype. It’s interesting to consider whether the audience for both platforms overlaps enough for it to be too much of a good thing; by allowing video chat on Facebook you might necessarily make Skype a much less crowded place, very quickly. The 750m users of Facebook are both a boon and a potential source of trouble for Skype. One of the things that was interesting in the conference was when the camera cut to further back in the press conference to reveal the journalists recording the event. Not as you might think, if you had watched too many West Wing episodes, were they all diligently leaning forward, facing the person speaking. Rather, as the picture above demonstrates, were they entirely arranged facing perpendicular to Mr. Zuckerberg, furiously typing away on their laptops. They weren’t reporting for tomorrow’s newspapers – or yesterday’s – they were reporting live, a constant stream of data for the data-hungry populous to instantly discuss and further disseminate.

Mr. Zuckerberg spoke confidently on Moore’s Law, applying it to the continuing growth in use of applications and tools by users on Facebook. Zeitgeist is in no position to question Zuckerberg’s thinking, yet it would seem that Moore’s Law applies to development and acceleration of technological development. Here, Zuckerberg is trying to apply it to sociological developments, rooted as they are in a technological sphere. However since Zeitgeist’s blog has not yet quite reached 750m users, we’ll defer to Zuckerberg’s opinions on the subject.

Who will win this showdown for social hegemony depends rather upon who you ask, but also upon what metric you’re looking at. Zuckerberg, rather dismissively, said it wasn’t about the number of users, but about how much they engaged with content. He may change his mind if news of a Facebook exodus in mature markets continues, and if Google has anything to say about it.