The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [16]
Even so, it was a surprise when, on April 21, 2010, readers loaded the Washington Post homepage and discovered that their friends were on it. In a prominent box in the upper right corner—the place where any editor will tell you the eye lands first—was a feature titled Network News. Each person who visited saw a different set of links in the box—the Washington Post links their friends had shared on Facebook. The Post was letting Facebook edit its most valuable online asset: its front page. The New York Times soon followed suit.
The new feature was one piece of a much bigger rollout, which Facebook called “Facebook Everywhere” and announced at its annual conference, f8 (“fate”). Ever since Steve Jobs sold the Apple by calling it “insanely great,” a measure of grandiosity has been part of the Silicon Valley tradition. But when Zuckerberg walked onto the stage on April 21, 2010, his words seemed plausible. “This is the most transformative thing we’ve ever done for the web,” he announced.
The aim of Facebook Everywhere was simple: make the whole Web “social” and bring Facebook-style personalization to millions of sites that currently lack it. Want to know what music your Facebook friends are listening to? Pandora would now tell you. Want to know what restaurants your friends like? Yelp now had the answer. News sites from the Huffington Post to the Washington Post were now personalized.
Facebook made it possible to press the Like button on any item on the Web. In the first twenty-four hours of the new service, there were 1 billion Likes—and all of that data flowed back into Facebook’s servers. Bret Taylor, Facebook’s platform lead, announced that users were sharing 25 billion items a month. Google, once the undisputed leader in the push for relevance, seemed worried about the rival a few miles down the road.
The two giants are now in hand-to-hand combat: Facebook poaches key executives from Google; Google’s hard at work constructing social software like Facebook. But it’s not totally obvious why the two new-media monoliths should be at war. Google, after all, is built around answering questions; Facebook’s core mission is to help people connect with their friends.
But both businesses’ bottom lines depend on the same thing: targeted, highly relevant advertising. The contextual advertisements Google places next to search results and on Web pages are its only significant source of profits. And while Facebook’s finances are private, insiders have made clear that advertising is at the core of the company’s revenue model. Google and Facebook have different starting points and different strategies—one starts with the relationships among pieces of information, while the other starts with the relationships among people—but ultimately, they’re competing for the same advertising dollars.
From the point of view of the online advertiser, the question is simple. Which company can deliver the most return on a dollar spent? And this is where relevance comes back into the equation. The masses of data Facebook and Google accumulate have two uses. For users, the data provides a key to providing personally relevant news and results. For advertisers, the data is the key to finding likely buyers. The company that has the most data and can put it to the best use gets the advertising dollars.
Which brings us to lock-in. Lock-in is the point at which users are so invested in their technology that even if competitors might offer better services, it’s not worth making the switch. If you’re a Facebook member, think about what it’d take to get you to switch to another social networking site—even if