I have hope for Facebook being the new Google

Facebook just released facebook marketplace, where its members can sell things, like housing, jobs, or textbooks. Strategically, this makes a lot of sense, since it's something that's actually useful to its members, especially if it ties your social network information into what you want to buy and sell. From the looks of it though, it doesn't do that. But I'm sure someone at Facebook is thinking about it.

Facebook is social networking done right--at least better than any competitors that I've seen. On the surface they might all seem the same; there's a personal profile page, there's a list of friends, and you can send messages back and forth with each other. However, I think there's some critical differences.

MySpace has a larger user base, but it is largely seen by its owners as a platform for media advertising. It's an unsupported assertion, but given its mishmash feature set and large ads, it's hard to think otherwise.

Friendster was the leader for quite some time, but has since lost the attention of the under 25 demographic (anecdotal evidence). Their mistake was adding things that were technically neat, but ultimately made the site too slow to use. It's a lot better now, and people are still using it. But based on the features they've put out it seems like they are interested in helping people publishing media to a user's personal network--using blogs, videos, etc. However, no news trickles of them attracting otaku developers, and I'm sure firing the now founder of Renkoo didn't help win over the hearts and minds of otaku developers.

On the other hand, Facebook is seen by its owners as a platform for technology driven innovation to help keep up social interactions between individuals. I'm not sure when the transition happened, but it was more evident to me after news feeds were released. Now, most people were vehemently opposed to it, but I saw it as two things.

First, it was a feedback mechanism to open up sharing. The more you share about yourself to your friends, the more you appear on their radar, and the more interaction you'll interact/message them. This seems to be inline with the goal of keeping people talking with each other.

Secondly, it was the basis of publishing personal news without even having to push a button. We all gather news about the world, but beyond CNN, there's also another type of news we're interested in--information about what our trusted friends are doing. Blogs lets you publish just by pushing a button. Facebook Mini-feeds lets you publish just by doing what you normally do on Facebook. It's not inconceivable that in the future, you can also publish from your mobile that you have free time to chill out, and people can just join you to hang out because they saw that you were available in their mini-feed on their mobiles.

Facebook is pulling ahead in terms of their feature offerings because they seem to be able to attract developers that are the otaku of programmers that are willing to innovate something that's actually useful to their users. Which other social network puts programming puzzles in their mini-feeds? Which other social network has an API? The alacrity in which they deploy features is stunning as well. They implemented twitter pretty easily by listing their status updates. It is in this way that I see them being a 'new Google'--they are setting themselves up as a hacker's paradise and attracting otaku programmers that way.

When Zuckerberg held out against getting brought out, he was either being greedy or he had future plans on what he would be able to do with a social network. Most of the press criticized him for being the former, but it's looking like it's the latter. As long as Facebook is useful for their users, there's value in the social network data that can be used by future applications. If they can establish themselves as the standard platform from which all social information about an individual is gathered through their API, this world would be a changed place, just as Google changed the world with its technology.