Ship’s Biscuit — Flipping the digital landscape to portrait.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on America’s 60 Minutes last night. Apparently this is a popular show that a whole bunch of people in America watch. It’s presented by an old lady who pretends not to know anything about anything. I didn’t watch the programme myself but I did watch the bit about Mark Zuckerberg on the 60 Seconds web site. He’s a curious fellow with a nerdy demeanour which almost seems disingenuous. Anyway, take a look at the specific bit and come back to me when you have.

Now, if you skipped on without reading, it’s very important that you watch it because there has been a lot of mean things said about young Mark in the blogsphere (which I’m now re-naming the villagers-with-torches-sphere) following this appearance. Worste of all is Duncan Riley over at Techcrunch, who, in my opinion, took the young CEO’s comments out of context. Before you believe any of the nonsense in the villagers-with-torches-sphere, watch the interview and make up your own mind. Watch very carefully for a very earnest Charlene Li, who claims that Facebook is a serious threat to Google because this point that I would specifically like to discuss.

The video is 12.5 minutes long but it’s a great introduction to the saga so far.

Forrester analyst Charlene Li’s assertion that Facebook is a challenge to Google couldn’t be further from the truth. Here’s my reasons why;

1. I feel it’s like comparing a splendid old library with the pub, it’s utterly rediculous to think that you wouldn’t use Google to find information about a possible holiday to Mali in favour of asking friends and relatives on Facebook. They are completely different, Google is synchronous, wheras Facebook is asynchronous meaning that Google gives you results straight away, ok you might have to trawl through a couple of pages but you are on a voyage of discovery, you learn other things you weren’t looking for, hell you might even find the cheapest deal with car rental thrown in. Within miliseconds of searching for ‘Mali’ there is everything I need to know right in front of me. For 60 Seconds to point out that there were over 200,000 results simply compounds the error; I’m not going to read every one of those 200,000 pages, I’ll look through until I’m satisfied. No matter how well travelled you or your friends are, your friends on Facebook will have limited knowledge of your intended destination and can only give you narrowly focused and anecdotal information. Unless of course, they just happen to have been to Mali, in which case they may know lots. But with hundreds and thousands of holiday destinations on the planet, what are the chances of that?
2. The way in which Li describes the use of Facebook wouldn’t even occur to most people, people use Facebook for playing Texas Hold ‘Em Up with their grannies, not planning their next holiday. Ok, I understand that Facebook could be used in this way but how many people really will, compared with Google or even Yawho? This just isn’t the way people use that web site.
3. Facebook is just one of many social networks which isn’t even the biggest in it’s category in it’s place of origin, whereas Google has over 43% (source: ComScore) market share in it’s category globally.
4. Online attention is dual channel, meaning that most people are likely to use more than one web site at the same time to discover information you don’t use Facebook OR Google, you use both, they are not mutually exclusive. The same can even be said of MySpace and Facebook.
5. Google won’t tell you anything itself, it just points you to somewhere it thinks can tell you, Li is fundamentally saying that asking your mates on Facebook about a holiday is more effective than looking at the entirety of the indexed web.

And that’s it, rant over. This isn’t intended to be against Li’s comments or Li herself but more of a criticism of the recent lauding of Facebook as The Next Big Everything, when it’s in fact just a nice place to hang out, a bit like the pub.