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It has been just under 2 months since Facebook launched their platform initiative, but this self-opening move has already had an extremely positive impact on the company. The changes are not limited to the company itself, however. The move has also disrupted the Internet industry as a whole and web 2.0 today looks very different than it did just 2 months ago. Let's take a look at what has changed since the launch of Facebook's Platform.

Facebook, the next big thing

They say "great entrepreneurs are great story-tellers." And that is exactly what flashed in the minds of journalists and developers who attended the launch announcement of the F8 Platform when 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg appeared on stage. His youth and excitement had many people saying that Zuckerberg was channeling a young Steve Jobs. Today, because of the reasons we've discussed in the Pivots of the Internet article and all the acquisition offers that Facebook has consistently denied, Facebook is widely expected to take on Google as "the next big thing." Though their numbers are still far below MySpace and they have not garnered the traditional media attention that MySpace has, their growth rate is impressive and their vision is very promising. The Facebook Platform reminds many of us of Windows; and people are calling it "the social operating system" on which you can develop your Internet apps.

Mark Zuckerberg's F8 introduction speech:

Now flashback 25 years, here is Steve Jobs:

Facebook VC Funds

Perhaps the biggest sign of the Facebook Platform's economic value is the interest of angel investors and venture capital funds in applications developed specifically for Facebook. The biggest announcement so far has come from Bay Partners; a Cupertino-based VC that firm announced that it will invest seed-stage money into promising Facebook app ideas via their new AppFactory program (see our previous coverage). That such a well established VC company will focus so exclusively on Facebook is likely very good news for Facebook.

Google has announced a similar program called Google Gadget Ventures for its own platform, iGoogle. But Google's platform hasn't been able to create the same buzz as the Facebook Platform, and while Google is using internal funds to attract external developers, Facebook funding has formed organically, separate from the company.

New Opportunities

As a consequence of the two previous impacts, a new cottage industry has blossomed around the Facebook Platform. It has become the ubiquitous way of reaching mass users in a short period of time. The friction-free and viral nature of Facebook apps has caused some web innovators to shift their attention to developing for Facebook.

Many startups have changed their business plans to focus on utilizing the Facebook platform to spread their applications among the social network's 30 million users. Facebook app awareness has become a specialty that recruiters often look for in resumes. Some companies have even made small-scale acquisitions, apparently with the main purpose of acquiring talented Facebook developers (see SideStep's purchase of Extended Info).

Today an interesting competition has emerged between two already successful online slideshow companies; as Josh Catone stated in a previous article, the rivals have extended their fight to the Facebook Platform too and are battling for the broadest reach. These companies have made acquisitions in order to broaden their Facebook reach, see Slide's acquisition of Favorite Peeps, for instance.

Deprecated Strategies

With the introduction of the Facebook Platform, many Facebook/MySpace killer ideas have died. Hopes to take on social networking giants with more features have become nonsense; in other words, feature companies became obsolete. Even the strongest verticals, local social networks, have been affected by the move to open up Facebook to outside developers. As a result, many of these companies have been forced to change their strategy to stay afloat.

Perhaps the boldest strategy change so far has come from Ziki. The successful meta social networking site seems to have shifted its focus to people search, rather than simply social networking. Because the meta functionality was nothing but a feature on top of traditional social networking it was bound to be better as a Facebook app than as a full company. After all, in social networking, the most important parameter is critical mass (number of people that use your platform) and not the features you have. With the Facebook Platform, anyone can add meta features to Facebook, which is where the people already are.

Ziki's evolution from social network to people search.

Conclusion

In my opinion, these latest developments are enough to demonstrate why Facebook has already gained the reputation as "the next big thing" for many of us. It's very interesting that a private company, with revenues far less than the Google, can attract such mass attention from the media, users, VCs and an entire industry. I can only explain it with love: we all love Facebook's services, their culture and their decision to open their API. We hope that they can breathe fresh air into the industry. The only thing that bothers me is Facebook's so-called "dirty history" (the lawsuit against Zuckerberg from a Harvard classmate that contends he stole the original Facebooks source code). Hopefully, they'll resolve that problem and march on toward an IPO.

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How considerate of Facebook to wait until Read/WriteWeb's Facebook Week to announce their first major acquisition. For an as-yet-undisclosed sum, Facebook has acquired Parakey, a Web OS company founded by Firefox co-founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. Read/WriteWeb was one of the first blogs to profile Parakey last November, and at the time Richard MacManus said that Parakey had "the potential to help bridge the current gap between Web and desktop applications."

Ross describes Parakey as "a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do." Here's a quote from an IEEE specutrum article that I think explains what the still-unlaunched Parakey is attempting to be pretty well:

"Today, something like e-mail can involve two completely different experiences, depending on whether or not you??™re using the Web -- Outlook versus Hotmail, for example. A Parakey e-mail program, on the other hand, provides a single access point for your mail, "unifying the desktop and the Web," in Ross??™s words. Parakey is intended to be a platform for tools that can manipulate just about anything on your hard drive -- e-mail, photos, videos, recipes, calendars."

The big question is, what does Facebook want with Parakey? It seems fairly clear that Facebook wants their platform to become the OS for the web, but now it also seems that perhaps they want to be come the operating system period.

TechCrunch is reporting that Google may also have been a bidder for Parakey. Considering Google's moves into the web platform space and the long standing rumors of a Google OS, that wouldn't surprise me.

What do you think about Facebook's acquisition? Does this make sense for the company? Does this signal that they are trying to compete with Redmond? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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When Borders announced that they were partnering with the social networking site Gather.com I was not in favor of the partnership. I think my quote was:The fact that they chose Gather.com and not Facebook.com indicates to me that Borders is not really serious about social marketing. Combined with a press release that basically says if [...]

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This week I spoke with Barney Pell, CEO of Powerset; and Melek Pulatkonak, COO of hakia. In both (separate) conversations we discussed how the Semantic Web is getting very close. The Semantic Web as defined by Tim Berners-Lee is: "a universal platform for the exchange of data, information and knowledge." I think Barney and Melek would agree, that the only thing preventing the Semantic Web so far has been an inefficient use of horsepower - or a lack of it.

Speed, Power and Getting There

Semantics is expressed meaning in language, code or "other" representations of information. My discussions with Barney and Melek revealed the fundamental differences in architecture and philosophy between hakia and Powerset. The index systems of the two companies are fundamentally different, as is their philosophy - but their goals and visions are remarkably similar. They are also different in the way they apply what I term horsepower to natural language search. Like the symbolism of Shelby vs. Ferrari,?– it is possible for different approaches to achieve a desired result - given enough horsepower.

Hakia has built their search in-house, refining and sculpting the QDex indexing system (like an Enzo Ferrari). Their view is that processing power should be maximized with super efficiency, via fuzzy logic and advanced semantics. Powerset, on the other hand, utilizes basically the same inverted indexing system as Google - but backed by natural language and immensely powerful processing that essentially ?“overpowers?” the long tail query (like the GT 500). This is a vast oversimplification, but the elements involved reveal the larger story.

Technology (horsepower), communication (language) and people make up the semantic Web. The Web has not been lacking "language", but the adequate application of processing power. As Barney said: "Even five years ago we did not have the processing capability to even attempt this, but five years from now these answers will seem elementary." Google's system below, currently consumes massive horsepower with comparatively limited results - at least according to hakia and Powerset!

Diagram of Google's inverted index and search (courtesy -changturtle)

Unbending Humans

Barney described the relationship between people and computers as people being "bent" around or adapted to technology in order to utilize it. With the advent of services like Facebook, programs and applications are beginning to ?“understand?” each other. Everyone reading this has been ?“forced?” by technology to conform to varied ?“bending events?”, in order to use it. Barney explained this idea by calling Facebook and the iPhone true innovations approaching total ?“community engagement.?” Barney also said that ?“Facebook will become one of the primary communications platforms of the future.?” Given this new perspective, I could not agree more because Facebook is one heck of a representation of information for a social network. Essentially, hakia, Powerset, Facebook and others are bending the machines to engage humans. And in a way, Facebook is the semantic Web in a microcosm - but in it's infancy.

Semantics and Search?

Search is a critical part of our daily lives, but the interface has changed very little over the years. We define search as the act of typing in a query on Google and getting results. This is a type of search, but how many other kinds of ?“searches?” do we perform? In an earlier article, Josh Catone wrote about Yahoo!?’s contention that search will not determine the future of the Web. Josh rightly asked if Facebook and MySpace might be better positioned if ?“personalization?” was to be the future of the Web.

Conclusion

I should make it clear that neither Barney nor Melek really consider themselves as "Google Killers". Powerset and hakia are not in a race either against each other or to overtake Google, but they are on a quest for better Web communication and engagement. Both efforts emphasize the necessity for ?“the system?” to be able to universally understand and handle data without ambiguity. Viewing Facebook and others as functional repositories of semantic data is essential in seeing the long view. Whether we are talking about object oriented data, textual semantics or complex algorithms, the semantic Web is about making people ?“bend?” less for technology.

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Couple of interesting stories I came across:Catalyst reports on the first viral marketing campaign by a major pharmaceutical companyPronet reports on Social Media Versus Traditional Media: Brand Impact AnalysisPablo has a review of The New Digg For Online Marketers- Sphinn.comSearch Marketing Standard begins a series on advertising on social networksReview of Buzznet, a social networking [...]

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In a previousarticle, we explained that the pivot of the internet is shifting from search tosocial interactions. But this doesn't necessarily mean that search is losing its value.After all, don't we still live with previous paradigms like single sign-on ande-commerce? Search is still a crucial paradigm and so all the Internet bigcos continuefighting for position - and some of them ultimately aim to usurp the search leader,Google. In this article, we take a closer look at the competitive advantages of GoogleSearch and try to find out whether Google is really beatable.

Google's Competitive Advantages

1. Free SEO Labor

Google's work force is not limited to their PhDs and 15,000 talented employees inMountain View, New York and Dublin. SEOs from all around the world can be considered afree labor force for Google. In order to get their sites promoted on the world's numberone search engine, SEOs optimize their sites according to Google's rules, register theirsitemaps and ping Google's services whenever a new page is created. This gives Google ahuge advantage over the other search engines, because other engines don't have the samelevel of feedback. Google caters to this crowd very well too, because it offers SEOfriendly tools and advise.

2. Extra data - Google Co-op, Image Labeler, etc

With its customized search service, Google Co-op,users don't only create vertical a search engine - they also give Google very valuabledomain-specific information.

Also, by tagging images on ImageLabeler and Picasa, you help perfect Google'sImage Search.

3. Google knows everything about your site

Google made a very smart acquisition back in 2004. They bought Urchin and converted itto a free traffic analysis add-on for your site, Google Analytics. Today many sitesuse it to get a better understanding of their traffic. But a side effect of this tool isthat it potentially gives Google access to important data about your site. Indeed if allsites had Urchin installed, Google would no longer need to compute pageranks, as it wouldhave the most accurate access to site popularity possible! Obviously not all sites useGoogle Analytics, but still it is not an insignificant amount that do.

The recently acquiredFeedBurner also serves the same purpose. It's notonly a great advertising channel for Google, but yet another way of measuring sitepopularity.

4. Google knows a lot about you - Personalization

Gmail, Google Toolbar, Google Docs and others. They all give clues about yourpersonality, your interests, likes and dislikes. Consequently, you end up with morepersonalized search results. For example: if you are the type of person who searchesfor programming info in Google Search, discuss KDE's latest bugs on GTalk and Gmail,visit Freshmeat and Sourceforge all day and long with your Google Toolbar-powered Firefox-- well then Google will not consider your Python, Tomcat, Apache queries as zoological,but programming related

5. Google offers UNIVERSAL search

Google does not only crawl the Web, blogosphere, press releases and books. It alsocrawls the real world with Google Earth. And Google Map's Street View lets you drivearound big cities like New York and San Francisco, from your browser. Now with Universal Search, you can reach all of these services with a simple Googlesearch.

6. Google has psychological dominance

The fact that Google is such a widely discussed topic makes you think that it isindispensable. Psychologically, you feel that you lack it when you try other searchengines. Especially if your query is indefinitely motivated - e.g your purpose ismore about researching than finding - then you always want to try your search on Googleas well, even if you were already satisfied with other results elsewhere.

7. Google is everywhere

OK, let's say you decided to switch search engines. You still have obstacles, suchas:

• If you use one of the Google network services, like Gmail, you always have Google topof mind;
• If you go to CNN.com, you have Google in the toolbar (on the US version at least); so why bother with entering a newURL for search?
• If you use Firefox, Safari or Opera, then Google is your default search provider,home page and feed subscriber.

I could go on, but the point is - there's noescape from Google. This is not merely the success of algorithms, but also thesuccess of Omid Kordestani and the whole business development team.

8. Google has looooooots of ca$h

As of today, Google's market valuation is more than $150 Billion. They have lots ofcash reserves (although not as much as Microsoft) and their profit margins are very high.In other words, Google is financially very healthy and they have the power to snap up anyinnovation developed externally. Just as they did with FeedBurner, Kaltix and Urchin.

Competitive Landscape

In summary, competition in the search arena is not limited to algorithms only. Youhave a lot of obstacles before you can take on Google.

The real question is: does this all mean that Google is unbeatable in terms of marketshare? Even though Microsoft's Don Dodge saidthat even a 1% share in search market is very valuable, the fact is that Google dominatessearch. And that dominance brings monopoly and privacy issues to the fore.

I don't think Google is unbeatable (although you may think I'm completely biased, as Iwork for Hakia!). Google can be beat. On the algorithm side we are seeing intensivesemantic methods emerge, which may in time challenge statistical methods like pagerank.But even outside the algorithm, bigcos continue to fight Google - especially Microsoft,which has the necessary cash and single sign-on power to potentially win the searchspace.

Moreover, vertical search engines may come to the rescue in solving most of the domainspecific problems. In the same way, innovations in user interface and other areas continue to flourish.

Conclusion

Beating conventional wisdom is not so unusual. Commodore, Lotus, AOL are examples ofpreviously dominant tech companies that eventually fell by the wayside. So even thoughGoogle looks very strong and rock solid to many of us, it can be beat. But it will takemore than technology and marketing alone, because as the above points show - Google isstrong in a lot of different ways.

Disclosure: Emre Sokullu works for Hakia, an alternative search engine toGoogle

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FoldSpy is a new app that soft-launched yesterday and aims to help web developers optimize ad placements on their websites. Because every browser, operating system, and especially screen resolution will display pages a little different, the "fold" (the part of the website that is visible without needing to scroll) is not the same for every visitor to your site. FoldSpy lets website owners see their site how their visitors see it and figure out how best to place above-the-fold ads so that a maximum number of visitors will see them.

The free app installs on your server (by inserting a single line of code) and creates a javascript overlay by navigating to /#foldspy. The javascript display shows which part of your site is visible at various screensizes, and can be manipulated to any dimension. As you change the size of the visible portion, FoldSpy tells you which percentage of your visitors can see everything displayed in the visible area. The end result is knowledge of the exact screensize in px that you should develop for to reach the maximum number of above-the-fold viewers.

FoldSpy is the first product of Eoghan McCabe, a two person web development outfit out of Dublin, Ireland. "Right now, people have to guess about where to place ads on their site as there's no easy way to know what people see," McCabe told us. FoldSpy fixes that problem with an extremely simple and elegant solution.

The free version of FoldSpy uses global browser stats culled from all FoldSpy users, but for $6/month FoldSpy can collect data only from your website, which of course would be more helpful. If 85% of FoldSpy users are tech sites, for example, the data would be skewed toward higher screen resolutions and newer browsers. So if you run a site about knitting, the global stats might not actually reflect your users at all. (That's just an example, I have no idea what FoldSpy's current user base is like.) So ponying up for a pro account is probably wise if you want the app to provide truly useful data to help you determine your website's ad placements.

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