The battle between the two giants of the Net, which has accelerated this
week, is revealing of a very important global issue.
At first glance, they look very similar: both created by students at a
prestigious American university, (one in 1998, and the other in 2004),
keeping a start-up spirit, leading the same battles for transparency of
private life and the free Internet, earning their living by selling
advertising, both want to know our doings and become the Web standard. They
both reached $2 billion in 5 years. And today, they each control about 7% of
global web traffic.
Their model is however very different: To know the behavior of people,
Google claims to help them in their professional, academic or private life,
to search, make phone calls, navigate; to achieve the same goal, Facebook
wants to help everyone to engage with others and for that, they try to
become the standard system for login, links sharing, third-party sites
comments.
Should we predict that in the future Google will manage our solitary daily
life, and Facebook our relationships with others? And which of the two will
prevail? Will we be a juxtaposition of autistics or members of an infinity
of tribes?
Today, Google seems to prevail: The firm from Mountainview is valued $190
billion, or 5 times more than Facebook, whose turnover represents only a
quarter of the profits of its competitor.
But the dynamics are rather on the side of Facebook since August 2010,
Americans spend more time on Facebook than Google (41 million minutes per
month against 40 per month) and more Internet users are now using Facebook
as their homepage than Google.
Thus, Google has focused on an ancient battle, that of the email address (in
competition with Yahoo and Hotmail), while more and more young people use
only social networks, chat and sms to communicate, they have no problem
posting very intimate pictures there, and even break up over Facebook.
Google did not innovate, but by buying external projects, such as YouTube
(more videos are viewed every day than searches are done on Google) or with
the new Google Wallet, means of payment by phone.
While Facebook is becoming a way to organize consumption and form consumers
and voters opinion.
All in all, Facebook is the passport to enter the virtual continent, while
Google will be nothing more than one of the guides to explore it.
Some think that Facebook’s growth will be limited by the number of people
that a human brain can have meaningful relationships with, limited to 150
according to biologists, but experience shows that people readily accept an
unlimited number of strangers as friends on virtual networks; and that there
is no decision that they are not ready to make on the web.
Thus, the future belongs to the networks and to those who will know how to
expand them. And first to those who will know how to take control of the
major networks still independent: allied to Facebook, Spotify (European site
with network music) could compete with Apple. Combined with Google, Twitter
(micro-blogging) could compete with Facebook. Then those networks that will
know how to organize payment systems and virtual currencies, especially
related to video games.
Dice aren’t cast yet: Amazon takes serious positions on cloud computing,
Microsoft has bought Skype, Apple focuses on the top of the range, Twitter
could become a pole of independent development. And so many others, that
will give birth to novel applications, banks, telephone operators, public
services, in a reordering with new power relations. Finance, politics,
education will have to be thought differently; our daily lives will be
turned upside down.
Naturally, in all this, Europe is almost absent.