The Facebook and the Friendfeed marriage could have much larger future implications on social networking, content indexing and real time search. In the triangulur contest between Google, Facebook and Twitter, each of these players had one big speciality. Facebook has bad search for the vast quantity of content generated by its users worldwide. Google has good search but is not optimized for breaking news or user generated content. Twitter has adequate search for its content, generated by a small percentage of its users generating to keep the rest of the world up to date on breaking news; however, at 45M users it’s dwarfed by Facebook’s 250M users.FriendFeed has a powerful search engine on status and aggregates from multiple sources, including Twitter and Facebook, but doesn’t have the cache of any of the aforementioned players.
So Facebook + FriendFeed combination becomes interesting because 1) it allows Facebook to tap into the real-time stream of consciousness that Twitter does so well, and 2) it acquires a real-time search engine to further support its efforts to improve search (which has been in beta testing since June), including the recent incorporation of Microsoft’s Bing. This, on the surface, would seem as though the “Face-Feed” combination is taking direct aim at Twitter (#1) and Google (#2). (or is it the other way around?)
It’s clear that social media is becoming a core asset that the big players want to protect and cultivate. Once the dust settles, it will have a fundamental impact on how brands communicate with consumers.
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