March 2010
Google was so 2009
Facebook has finally usurped Google as the #1 website by visitors in the US. More people now start their website journey in Facebook than Google. This is an interesting change not just in the numbers but in how people interact with the web. Back in November we suggested that ‘Email is something old people do’, maybe how the majority of us use Google has become ‘dated’, and in fact to use it as a start to our web journey will garner mockery from our children.
Often technical users (particularly older ones), watch in bemusement as new users looking for a specific website, direct their browser again and again to Google before typing in the name of the website they’re looking for to the search rather than the address bar. With the rise of Google the address bar became almost clumsy with too many “/” “:” and “.com”, the Google page was svelte, clean and simple; it appealed directly to the ‘new user’ someone who had grown up without the web and thus wanted something to make it easy.
Facebook is certainly not going to win any user interface awards, it often clumsy to navigate and overwhelming with information. Web users are increasingly comfortable with this though, they are happy to trawl through the vast quantity of unwanted info in order to email, message, or check what their friends are up to.
What is exceptionally interesting though about Facebook is that its user generated, filtered and presented. There is no Google algorithm working mysteriously in the background, the content you see on Facebook is chosen by your friends, rather than a computer. There is already a mechanism for this within ‘search’, social bookmarking such as Digg, Stumbled Upon et al, allow you to tag and share web pages, Facebook has dabbled, but to a lesser extent. What will change the market will be the ‘opening’ of Social Networks, so that you can have a universal platform, it doesn’t matter if you tag content in Facebook, Hi5, Digg, Twitter, or Delicious its presented to all your chosen contacts regardless of their platform.
Peter Thiel back in November suggested that Social Networks are not only near the end of their evolution, but also mark the end of evolution on the web. He is wrong, and you just have to open Outlook 2010 to see that Microsoft hold a very different opinion. All you communication whether Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or (old fashioned) email can be aggregated together, the source will be irrelevant, it will be presented the same. Social Networks will continue their march into the ‘messaging’ space eroding emails dominance, what remains unclear is how they will change ‘search’.
