Google vs Facebook
Recent years have witnessed many battles between web giants Facebook and Google, but where did it all begin? More recently Google launched their biggest weapon of mass destruction, Google+, and Facebook may be rethinking strategy. Up until this point Facebook has defeated Google on all grounds except search, but why the hard feelings in the first place? Can’t we all just be friends? Apparently not.
Google Facebook War | OpenSocial
Adam D’Angelo, a very early employee of Facebook gave his two cents on TechCrunch about the beginnings of the Facebook Google war:
“‘To me, the biggest increase in tension was Google’s launch of OpenSocial in 2007. After seeing the success of Facebook Platform, Google went and got all the other social networks committed to OpenSocial under NDA without telling Facebook, then broke the news to Facebook and tried to force them to participate.”
If you are unfamiliar with OpenSocial, it is according to Wikipedia: “a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google along with MySpace and a number of other social networks.”
If you’re wondering why Facebook was so upset about Google’s 2007 development, its because at that time Google expressed no interest in getting involved in the social networking game and Facebook really didn’t have its nose in the search engine game, so the news came as quite a surprise. And to the onlooker, a kind of ruthless stab at the up and coming social networking giant. But there’s more behind that attack my friend than the eye can see.
Google Facebook War | Friend Connect
How about Facebook’s counterattack? Well it was definitely a strong one. Facebook banned Google’s Friend Connect on its site and launched the Like button, Open Graph, and Connect. Back up a step, what’s Friend Connect? Friend Connect was Google’s social networking site that used the open interface allowing users to sign up without creating a different account and access information from other websites of which they are members. So Facebook banned the site and launched Facebook Connect, its personal open interface program, Facebook sunk Google’s battleship and dominated the web waters.
Google Facebook War | Microsoft and Myspace
We’ve still yet to dig up the root to this whole bloody mess. Well according to Jinghao Yan, yet another Facebook soldier:
“While talks had been going on for weeks, if not months, on October 24, 2007 — just a week before the OpenSocial announcement — Facebook formally accepted a $240 million investment from Microsoft for less than 2 percent of the social network.”
And the great part of this was that Microsoft outbid Google for this chunk of the social giant. The funny part is that Google threw $1 billion at Fox Interactive Media to run ads on Myspace. Probably a good investment at the time, but MySpace is a dead dog now, and Google is out for blood. Thus the beginnings of the great social networking war unveiled.