"Google owns search, but Facebook owns you. Which is more valuable for selling advertising?"

I disagree with this frame and this his implicit answer.

Facebook's advertising model is sort of inherently adversarial. Their ads have to distract you to be successful. That means there's always a tension between user experience of the product and the revenue stream.

Google's meaningful innovation was capturing your intent, so that it can give you relevant ads when you're actually looking something, often to buy. All the social stuff is in service of making that relevance part better, but it's an inherently more constructive model of advertising.

I think it also works a lot better, and is much harder to replicate than Facebook's.

"Facebook is the single largest threat to its long term business."

Okay, so I keep trying to wrap my head around this, but I just genuinely don't get this idea.

Facebook is huge, at the moment, but it has one public facing product. What does that product let you do? Be social, within its confines, and connect to everyone you ever knew, sharing links, photos and text snippets. Yeah, there's a lot of end-user value in that and, for as long as they can ride the power-law effects, Facebook will be an ad-revenue generating monster.

Google, on the other hand, has a suite of tools that lets people do almost everything else in the online world. Search is moving ever so slowly into the 3D/"real-world" through maps and product searches and now the goggles project (if it stands the test of time, of course).

In short, google helps its users manage their worlds whereas Facebook manages people in the Facebook world. Without significant expansion and diversification, Facebook has a much more precarious position, at least as far as producing end-user value goes.

Thus far, that innovation and expansion has been what? Facebook connect? Putting "like" buttons all over the web and tracking my every move? That's not value for the average Facebook user (for advertisers? sure, very much). So, what else? Letting me share all of my activities like what music I'm listening to, etc? All of that happens within the facebook walled garden – and that tactic makes the whole thing a bet the house gamble. As long as people stay with FB, it works, but once they drift away, it all falls apart just as quickly as it grew. (The power law can cut both ways)

I don't deny Facebook has a lot of value, but I just think that the more open framework/platform presented by Google is going to play out much more strongly in the long-run...

Actually, I think there are things you could call a 'social layer' that can be added to any product, for example:

1) Identity. Moving each product from having a silo'ed identity profile to having a centralized social profile.

2) Contacts. Many many products need to know not just who you are, but who you will be collaborating with. From sharing, to basic ACL settings on documents. For the consumer side, Social contacts replaces the previous layer that was used: Corporate LDAP servers or Mail servers (Notes/Exchange/ACAP/etc)

3) Sharing. Pretty much every app features some form of collaboration, even if it just means sending a link to someone.

4) Activity Log. Moreover, it is useful for many apps to keep a history of recent actions you've taken, either for the purpose of rolling them back, or for allowing you to search and find knowledge, either about what you did, or what a collaborator did.

dcurtis is basically repeating Zuckerberg's claim that social is something you can't add later, and I think this is hogwash. Sure, you certainly have to re-design the API. But that doesn't mean you have to invent a whole new product.

YouTube for example, doesn't have to throw away their entire product and start from scratch vs a product that may have been built from scratch for sharing videos on a social network.

I believe far far too much credit is being given to all kinds of hand wavy arguments about designing for social, or 'social dna', and not enough given to simple market timing, niche targeting, and network effects with respect to Facebook.

At this point, Facebook could produce really terrible product addons, they'd still continue to gain users. And competitors really can't differentiate themselves enough to siphon off users, because the marginal gain in utility isn't worth the switching costs.

Social networking, if it is as important as everyone says, is a commodity. Facebook's wall-garden has a substantial network effect of making it costly to choose other networks. If Facebook had been invented as a federated, distributed, open social network in the beginning, then, and only then, could you make all kinds of arguments about their user base being related to mythical 'social dna' or superior design ethos.

It's like looking at Microsoft Windows user base in the 90s, and saying it indicates that Apple "doesn't have desktop DNA" design chops, because clearly, all those users use Windows purely based on design decisions Microsoft made.

"Google+ is difficult design; it is not difficult engineering."

Either dcurtis@ isn't an engineer, or he's a much, much better engineer than the rest of us. : )

Facebook owns your identity in the sense that they own people's projections of who they are.

Google owns your identity in that they know what you want when no one else is watching.

Which do you think is actually more valuable? (Honest question - I have no idea).

I'm not sure it's nearly as clean cut as Dustin makes it seem, and the disclosure at the end is pretty relevant...money talks.

Could anyone expand on why they must build social products from scratch instead of adapting existing products?

It seems to me, the existing problems they have with the upgraded products are simply usability design problems. Something that could be fixed by just moving the right elements to the right places. Or, more importantly, adding links to the right "methods" of the right products at the right places in other existing products. I do think they've been making terrible design decisions lately, but that seems like something that can be fixed by just... getting better designers and listening to feedback.

Why exactly is that some people think otherwise?

The simile to Microsoft's early (and, arguably, continued) tablet efforts is apt.

Google isn't a social network, and the products they offer us as users will be stronger if they don't pretend to be. But they've built their business on selling insights into our preferences, and Facebook has shown that a social network is the richest way to gather the data needed for that model.

I'd find it more hopeful if Page showed any signs of understanding that Facebook isn't about the social graph, but rather about communications. Google should be using Gmail as a fulcrum, rather than Google+.

As dcurtis mentions, every one of Google's products has gotten worse when they added "social" to it. Even just their redesign to try to give things a consistent look has made gmail basically horrible, and that's without doing anything to the core functionality.

Even if you buy that facebook is an existential threat to Google, Google shouldn't be destroying itself even faster.

If I were Google, I'd focus on areas where Google's products are already strong, and expand those, vs. trying to force everything into a social box. I don't think social is the ultimate end of all products -- a 10% social effort (in targeted ways) combined with doubling down on Google's strengths, and hitting Mobile out of the park, would result in a much stronger Google than...Google+ and a castrated gmail.

Interesting take on it - I think he sums up my own views far more elegantly than I have been able to so far.

I think the notion of the bouquet is quite apt; the huge number of disparate google products are not something that can be made social with a simple update. In order to be so, they have to be completely re-imagined. Google+ as a social network was a good start (with circles and hangouts) but still was trying to shoehorn the social experience into the same google experience context.

The most frustrating thing for me when using Google's multitude of services is their login across services / accounts seems totally broken.

There are certain services I can't log into with a certain accounts, others that automatically log me out and others that I am totally confused about what is even happening.

It's not an easy task and it seems that they are trying to fix it with recent changes but it's still a total mess.

It would also help if Google's bouquet were a bit more fragrant.

In particular, I find Google+'s non-write access api to be my major stumbling block to using it, socially that is. I want to push twitter/fb to it. I want openness and I think it would help their adoption. That would be a bouquet I'd want to smell and I know many others as well.

On the plus side for Google: just about anybody who would want a (creepy) Facebook account now has one. Many of those who do will find out what a liability putting your life, and too many of your conversations, in public is over the next few years. I don't want to be owned by Facebook.

I think Facebook has hit its high water mark. I have little doubt Google will invent something unexpected and useful.

Google is getting the better of Facebook and us. With Gmail, Docs, Play, Plus, now Drive, and oh, search, it's hard to evade our big brother's gaze.

Seriously, what's going to hurt you more: having your Facebook profile suddenly shut down or your Google account?

Google is doing a major 1up on everyone, not just Zuckerberg.

I don't know on which ground the author can claim Google don't know the art of bouquets. Seemed a bit gratuitous for me, when referring to a company owning search, Chrome, Gmail, maps, Android, YouTube. Is it because they didn't discontinue Knol yet?

  "...creating its own clone social network..."

I beg to disagree but I think they all are clones. And in the last few months it have been more like Facebook mimicking G+ than the way around.

Offtopic: "Dustin Curtis is a villain."

whatever happened to The "Superhero"?

nah they're just saying that they think social is an important aspect of search, and messaging out to the world in preparation for integrating social everywhere.

then when regulators come calling about unfair search + social integration (assuming they make some inroads over time), they have a story already cooking, and a defense that social IS part of search, that goog's mission DOES involve social aspects.

What is that thing in the upper right corner?