How? badly. as Orkut and Buzz demonstrated. If I was Google, I wouldn't bother with flimflam and gimmicks, I'd take a long hard look at what made me so successful in the first place, and make sure I had the clearest, easiest to use and most relevant search product in the world.
I would prefer google would stick to being a search engine. They don't want to make the same mistake Yahoo made where they reached a point where they don't know what there core business is about.
I don't think google will ever stop trying to be involved with popular and upcoming internet events. Social networking and search engine can work well together, but google is doing a poor job getting their social sites recognized or used by the masses. Give them time.
Google's best bet is buy someone out that can compete. But really they should just stick to search and improve youtube. Facebook has it in the bag for now.
Google and Facebook are completely different company...google is giant search engine company...while FB is giant social network company....
They've already done that. They're not going to be gaining much more of the search market than they have already. Now they need to build a vertical network of web properties (and other ventures) that work well with each other. And that's exactly what they're doing. Some of their ideas work, some don't. But to just give up and be happy with what they have is pretty weak business advice.
How do you figure? Google is into a lot more than just search. Sure search is their bread and butter but they've got a lot of other properties. Android is likely to become the dominant mobile platform unless Windows 7 can make a dent soon. Google TV could potentially catch on and become wildfire (although there are still many years of improvement ahead, along with competition from Apple). If you think Facebook is going to stop at just being the dominant social network, you're going to be very surprised in the coming years. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft... I don't care what they're currently in. They're all after each other in the end.
You right...but to be honest i think Google is going to have a very hard time competing with Facebook...FB really does dominate the social media scene...BUT Facebook is not going to have as difficult time competing with google for paid advertising..FB ppc ads are becoming more and more popular because of their extreme targeting power...
They can and do produce new search products that work and produce revenue for them - this is what they are good at. This year they've introduced a paid promoted search product in YouTube, which works very well, and brings in income. But they cannot do social, they have tried and failed, with Orkut, Wave and Buzz. To keep trying to do what they've failed at it isn't good business advice.
Social media is massive, imagine all the page views facebook gets! :/ But for google to compete its going to have to do the same thing they did with youtube and just buy out facebook.
Google's social media services are mainly Orkut and Buzz. Orkut made it's own way to top before acquired by Google and the graph is going down since then. Buzz, in other hand is a failed attempt from Google.
I don't think Google has to compete much with Facebook. FB is eating market share that used to belong to Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Games, Geocities, MySpace, Livejournal, Pogo, etc. To great extent, Facebook is taking marketshare from first-movers who really, really sucked. For example, is there really anyone who isn't glad that civilization saw the light and moved the hell away from MySpace and its den of viruses/ads? I don't like Facebook much, but it's a huge improvement over the crap that came before it. For the most part, FB is displacing weak companies from good niches. FB is not a one-on-one competitor to Google. In fact, FB has largely weakened companies like Yahoo, which could have been competitors to Google. Frankly, until FB comes up with a better ad system -- particularly, improving click thru rates -- I don't think Google has much to fear.