Is Facebook the next Google?

That’s the question that many people are asking at the moment. I thought I’d pitch in a few ideas. First I need to put a bit about Google’s Universal Search into context. It is probably best explained by Cringely’s article Risk is for Losers, but I’ll try to summarize. After you read the article, the YouTube acquisition is starting to make sense. It is really (possibly, mostly) about search. With Universal Search, Google now links among others to YouTube videos and you know what, Yahoo! or MSN wouldn’t do that, because they would not really like to send stuff over to a competing service. Of course Google is saying that they are not playing with the search engine results to favor their own services, but having one that will return most of the videos is surely not a bad thing. That’s what they paid over $1 billion USD for YouTube. To further emphasize that they are in it for the long run, you can see JenSense’s post about disabling arbitrage publisher accounts on AdSense. These are the sites that have nothing more than AdSense links on them, with which you can make a good amount of money by buying keywords cheap and getting good clickthroughs on the visits you buy, resulting in more revenue, but there are more clever methods too. In the end, that’s probably a lot of revenue for Google, in the millions if not tens of millions of USD per year, and they are canceling in the name of quality. Very good move.

But let’s return to and there are some similarities. To learn more about what happened there check out this story on CNNMoney including an interview with Founder/CEO Zuckerberg. Again in short, you can now build applications on top of the Facebook platform (they are calling it platform now ;)), integrating your applications into Facebook itself. Xing has tried their hand at an API but it does not seem to fare too well. The difference with Facebook is that they are really a platform, or are becoming one. The applications you write become integrated into the platform and now it’s just about finding out what will work best with the users. Check out this interview with Ali Partovi from iLike who are signing up 200k new members a day via their Facebook application!

This is some real value for other sites and the cool thing is that Facebook, very similar to how Google works, is very open to what runs on their site. They might build a photo app but somebody else can too and whoever wins wins. It’s actually bit more like Microsoft in the sense that they are making available the operating system and programming language. The rest is up to you.

What is really interesting is the larger view, and here I can only suggest Paul Conley’s post about the next big thing. Salesforce is really already very similar in the sense that you have a widgetized architecture (just enabled my developer account again ;)) and while it’s for work, there could possibly a lot more things that people might want to integrate there, and possibly vice versa with Facebook. This widget infrastructure will be interesting in the future and we are all not sure where it leads.

One thing to remember though is that signing up 200.000 new members per day, doesn’t really pay the bills yet. So monetization of widgets will be interesting. I do not mean a money widget, that makes money as the idea of the widget, but monetizing a widget that is not there to make money.

Really interesting times these are.