Facebook talks ignoring Twitter, setting sights on Google
Facebook recently announced it had hit the 300 million users milestone. This makes Facebook a truly massive and global company, with users from all over the world. But Facebook does not exist in a bubble, with competition creeping up behind it and competition way out in front. So, where is the focus of attention at Facebook?
Facebook has, for me at least, become the ubiquitous social networking site. While MySpace looks and feels like it’s had its day, Facebook continues to grow, and at a truly phenomenal rate. But, both in terms of the number of users it has and the money it makes, Facebook is a long way behind tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
At this point in time it’s fair to say that Facebook isn’t really competing with those three companies, with Twitter, MySpace, Bebo and the like much more on the same level. But that’s not to say Facebook doesn’t harbor ambitions to move into that league.
In fact, in an interview with VentureBeat recently, Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s vice president of growth, mobile and international expansion, made clear that that is exactly the direction Facebook sees itself heading. At the same time, he completely shunned the idea that Twitter is competition.
Twitter is a great company. What they do is offer a way to publish information in a very consumable, public way. They’re in the rear-view mirror. To focus on a company with 40 million users that is not growing is not a good idea.
Our task is to make sure we innovate and to make sure there’s no new upstart experience that could take users away. Then No. 2 — we need to make sure that as more and more people use the product, we continue to keep it really elegant, simple and fast.
There are three people ahead of us. We have to be ubiquitous. We’re not building a place where Britney Spears says she is drinking a latte.
Ooh, snarky. The three people Facebook considers ahead of it are Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, with Google the biggest competitor and the one Facebook is looking to match in the future. This would be achieved by becoming the source and starting point for information that Google now is. So instead of heading for Google, Facebook wants to become such a dominant force that people will head to it for their consumable information instead.
I find the comments regarding Twitter a little rich though considering that Facebook has spent the last six months turning itself into a clone of the micro-blogging social network. If Twitter is so unimportant and forgettable why is Facebook bothering to mimic its usefulness with the live news feed, @ tagging feature, and Facebook Lite?
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September 23rd, 2009
I alone have over 10 FB accounts. So there probably arn’t 300 million people on there. 300 million accounts maybe.