War 2.0

With the advent of web 2.0 the internet saw a massive growth of a new dimension SOCIAL MEDIA. Socializing is something that people used to do on the Web; gradually it is becoming the Web. This is an Era of Social Networks, Facebook has suddenly emerged as new yet solo commanding lead but our old dear Google hasn’t really started fighting yet. Now, the stage is set for us to witness the most gruesome and yet epic battle of our times. A few miles the Googleplex in Palo Alto, both in California, Facebook is fiercely brooding over to prepare for the upcoming Google Goliath (Google+). Here, too, Google isn’t sitting still, and we already know that. Improved search as a part of the rationale for the +1 feature, which allows users to elevate their favourite search results in queries from their friends. Well Google’s not done here and this +1 is just an acorn. The war on Facebook is just in beta condition.

The clash between the two titans has gone ugly as it was reviled that Facebook had hired public relations agency to muck Google’s social networking tactics. This it’s evident that, like the tussles between Windows vs. UNIX, CISC vs. RISC and mainframes vs. Micros this new battle between Google & Facebook will sculpt the web industry for coming years. What Google and Facebook have in addition to the old media of web 2.0 is the data about every user which they mine with a plethora of advance technology, software and math to appropriate money out of users efficaciously. The work-model for Google and Facebook is identical: Free services and Charges for advertising. And like any other industry more the popularity more money you can charge for ad space. That is why Google and Facebook are striving to become de facto home for web users. Both target with ads, the users, by the information they have about you, to give very specific and precise results but at the same time haunt you relentlessly bordering onto your privacy.

Google in this war, to capture ad space, has a clear edge, for its wide presence and wide popularity. It also monitors its users not only through search engine queries but also through chrome browser and android apps. Facebook on the other hand can monitor people’s choice (rather taste) only through its own website (Perhaps an explanation for Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to incept scary notions about privacy).

Facebook on the other hand has two lethal arrows in its quiver; namely, crowdsourcing and games. Though Google has immensely powerful data centres, they at times give distorted results thus the idea, of Facebook, that your friends and relations can guide (crowdsource) you to more suitable, relative and better answers, is a challenge for Google. Facebook has also made elegant use of games to keep people within its domain. Just Zynga’s Farmville and Cityville account for 250 million and 140 million people who play social games every month.

Thus the mainstay of this industry so far is data mining and as said more is always the merrier. But with more, arise the engineering problems. The capacities of data centres are exhaustive. The processing power demands are ever increasing. The social web ahead will be highly interactive; we now stay connected with it via our portables. Tomorrow like GPS in our cell phones ‘the network’ will monitor our exact coordinates and will send us feeds to our queries extremely precise to our location ambience and even conveyance. The Crowdsourcing will be so effective and so very well disguised in social gamming that it will cope with the need for more parallel processing and also eliminate the need for outsourcing. Well though future, it is quite evident and will also have surprising cultural consequences and the fundamental human need for companionship will be redefined. Social networking is freedom and not bonding, but this statement is only true when the divulgence of personal opinion and information is judicious.