Is Facebook a threat to Google? First Facebook buys FriendFeed, a service that instantaneously aggregates information from social media sites. Then Facebook rolls out an improved search system, enabling users to browse through posts by friends, by Facebook users who have elected to go public, and by Web results — all in real time.
Asking whether or not Facebook is a threat to Google is key because as social networking is gaining popularity — unique visitors to Twitter, for example, grew 950 percent in the past year, according to July data from Web analytics firm Compete — more and more people are sharing information in real time, whether through status updates, tweets, photos or links. The need to track and sort through everything that has been posted is changing “search” as we know it. How?
First: The increased need for speed. While Twitter hasn’t replaced traditional journalism, for example, it has become a hub for breaking stories, with users tweeting about events like the February Turkish Airlines crash as it happened. Services like FriendFeed collect updates like this from sites like Twitter, notifies you about them, and allows you to search through all the posted data instantly. Meanwhile, traditional search, such as the kind Google does, indexes information from the Web only periodically. Google might therefore need to speed up its indexing to strengthen its market lead.
In an interview earlier this year with TechCrunch, Google Co-Founder Larry Page admitted: "I have always thought we needed to index the Web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it."
But why did Facebook, which already had a service akin to Friendfeed — its News Feed — still buy the company? Some, like CNET News and BusinessWeek, say that it’s a talent acquisition, as FriendFeed engineers are mostly ex-Googlers who helped build Web services like Google Talk, Google Maps, and Gmail. In any case, Facebook stands to learn and benefit from FriendFeed’s features. In the official press release, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor noted that they will “bring many of the innovations…developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”
Second: The increased need for relevancy. When the World Health Organization raised the pandemic alert on swine flu in April, social media blog Mashable reported more than 10,000 tweets per hour about the virus. Indeed, the constant stream of updates on sites like Facebook or Twitter makes it difficult to monitor relevant posts or sift through data. It’s crucial, therefore, to have an advanced search function that enables users to filter noise from news — a technology such as the one offered by FriendFeed, where you can even search for keywords.
Google already has an advanced search function, but it doesn’t have real-time results just yet. That is why analysts from media and technology publications like TechCrunch and BoomTown think a Google/Twitter team-up would be the right move, especially as Facebook’s reach expands. While Google has kept mum on this possibility, it did recently unveil “Google Caffeine,” an upgraded version that speeds up its search results and promises improved accuracy, size and comprehensiveness.
For now, it’s too early to see whether Facebook will be able to do in search what it had done in social networking. Nevertheless, Google needs to speed up searches to real time if it wants to stay ahead in the rapidly-evolving search race.
Can Twitter make it as a business tool?
The popular microblogging service hopes so, and is repositioning itself as a “communication” network, rather than a “social” network, with an eye toward offering paid analytics and other business tools.
How exactly can companies benefit? Think branding, public relations and market research. They can answer questions and interact with customers, highlight promotions, and basically “tweet” what’s happening organization-wide or personally, raising awareness and appeal. They can also find out what people are saying about them or a product in real time, either by asking “followers” directly, or by using features like Twitter search. And as more and more apps get built around Twitter — TwitPay, powered by PayPal, lets you buy and send payments, for one — the benefits increase.
A best-case example is Dell Outlet, whose coupons get retweeted by users and picked up by coupon sites, resulting in $3 million in additional sales. “The uplift has been more than we dreamed,” says Stefanie Nelson, Manager of Demand Generation, adding that brand awareness has grown. “When we respond to people on Twitter, they get really excited, and we gain advocates.”
But of course, it’s not all roses. It takes considerable time and effort to build “followers” and establish one’s footing on the site, especially because there’s so much customer churn. In fact, a recent Nielsen report found that roughly 60 percent of tweeters end up abandoning the service after a month, primarily because they just don’t “get into it.”
Another issue is managing expectations. Because of Twitter’s instantaneous nature, when users raise customer service concerns, they generally expect a quick reply — often, within hours. And because it’s in a public arena, executives can’t slip up when responding, no matter how confrontational the tweet, and regardless of the 140-characters-or-less limit, because news will travel fast.
Lastly, like most online applications (especially the free ones), security is a risk. A Twitter employee’s account recently got hacked and more than 300 confidential documents leaked out. Companies are also vulnerable to people claiming and falsely using their names inappropriately. Employees could also tweet about proprietary info, tipping off competitors. And the list goes on.
So can Twitter really be an effective business tool? The answer depends on two things: How much businesses use it, and how long Twitter can hold onto its users and, therefore, its appeal.
