Google Vs Facebook: From Traffic to Trust
An interesting news article that came out a few weeks back has got me thinking…. Facebook has overtaken Google to become the most popular website in the United States for the first time, according to new data from Hitwise, which measures Internet traffic. For the week ending March 13, the social networking juggernaut registered 7.07% market share, beating the search giant's 7.03% market share.
See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/8XVAKZ
What got me thinking was how could Facebook in such a short span of time overtake Google -the default destination for millions of internet users globally?
The data shows dramatic rise of Facebook- this can be attributed to the fact that people are spending more time on the net socializing, and an average user visits more pages on Facebook (not sure though if the Facebook Chat window refreshes are counted as part of the Hitwise data as the chart shows a phenomenal increase since April 2009).
On a different note, a person usually visits a Google page, only when he/she is seeking specific information.
On the face of it – one would assume that this phenomenon (of growing popularity of Facebook, and other Social Media platforms) is just about couple of years old… but this has been trending for quite sometime now with social bookmarking tools, which started around five to six years back and now with the new-kid-in-the-block - the Facebook ‘Like’ button -that a user can use to favour a particular web page.
Google in its current Avatar represents the Web 1.0 era, which was based on “Traffic” to the web-page. The relevancy of content on the Internet was based on Traffic to that page vis-a-viz a particular keyword/phrase. The whole idea of Page Rank depended largely on how many back links were there to the webpage and how much traffic was generated to the web-page…that gave relevancy of the page to the particular keyword that a person had searched for.
While the Web 2.0 era is all about community… the tools that is popular in this era is all about being ‘social’. This has given rise to community based tools for people to recommend and share content on the web. The relevancy of content on the Internet is not based on traffic, but on ‘trust’. How many people have Digg’d it, Reddit, Technorati’d, and now Facebook ‘Like’ed it makes the content more relevant … Even portals like YouTube (belonging to Google) gives some preference to the most favoured videos
The reason for the same is that people still trust in what other people say, even if they are total strangers. How else, do you think the salespersons still have their jobs :). While search-engines would still remain, and the algorithms get more and more effective in terms of picking relevant content from the Net… nothing can beat humans to read, comprehend and recommend what is right or wrong – online or offline.
For web owners, it is important that they start creating online properties and content with the objective of creating ‘trust’ rather than ‘traffic’ because in future ‘trust’ is what that drive traffic and nothing can beat Human Intelligence, especially not Artificial Intelligence
Cheers
Santosh
See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/8XVAKZ
What got me thinking was how could Facebook in such a short span of time overtake Google -the default destination for millions of internet users globally?
The data shows dramatic rise of Facebook- this can be attributed to the fact that people are spending more time on the net socializing, and an average user visits more pages on Facebook (not sure though if the Facebook Chat window refreshes are counted as part of the Hitwise data as the chart shows a phenomenal increase since April 2009).
On a different note, a person usually visits a Google page, only when he/she is seeking specific information.
On the face of it – one would assume that this phenomenon (of growing popularity of Facebook, and other Social Media platforms) is just about couple of years old… but this has been trending for quite sometime now with social bookmarking tools, which started around five to six years back and now with the new-kid-in-the-block - the Facebook ‘Like’ button -that a user can use to favour a particular web page.
Google in its current Avatar represents the Web 1.0 era, which was based on “Traffic” to the web-page. The relevancy of content on the Internet was based on Traffic to that page vis-a-viz a particular keyword/phrase. The whole idea of Page Rank depended largely on how many back links were there to the webpage and how much traffic was generated to the web-page…that gave relevancy of the page to the particular keyword that a person had searched for.
While the Web 2.0 era is all about community… the tools that is popular in this era is all about being ‘social’. This has given rise to community based tools for people to recommend and share content on the web. The relevancy of content on the Internet is not based on traffic, but on ‘trust’. How many people have Digg’d it, Reddit, Technorati’d, and now Facebook ‘Like’ed it makes the content more relevant … Even portals like YouTube (belonging to Google) gives some preference to the most favoured videos
The reason for the same is that people still trust in what other people say, even if they are total strangers. How else, do you think the salespersons still have their jobs :). While search-engines would still remain, and the algorithms get more and more effective in terms of picking relevant content from the Net… nothing can beat humans to read, comprehend and recommend what is right or wrong – online or offline.
For web owners, it is important that they start creating online properties and content with the objective of creating ‘trust’ rather than ‘traffic’ because in future ‘trust’ is what that drive traffic and nothing can beat Human Intelligence, especially not Artificial Intelligence
Cheers
Santosh
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