HTH

Think of NBC/CBC/ABC — people thought they would be behemoths forever. Now, they are fragmented stations in a sea of stations. FACEBOOK will likely go that way. But, it won’t take decades, it take years. Worshiping FACEBOOK today is short sighted.

GOOGLE on the other hand is something people need. And, they need it to stay BIG or get BIGGER – it serves functional purposes both for Consumers and Advertisers. BING may be chasing them. YAHOO’s as good as gone. But, GOOGLE is far more pervasive in people’s lives than FACEBOOK. We just don’t talk about it as much.

But, the day GOOGLE offers a new mobile service with one number for life, free Android handsets and free SMS messaging? That’s it, they own everyone…

GOOGLE can think long-term and I doubt they really worry about FACEBOOK or TWITTER in the way you portray here. If anything, GOOGLE wins by the continued migration of people from the real world to the false world of social media (OK, maybe “false” is a bit too strong, and I could have used “virtual,” but, the point is, it’s NOT the physical world).

Question is, who has better personal data Google search history or Facebook?

Information = data in context
Context = Organized data

Social data is mostly organized data, from that it’s easier to conjecture what information the user really wants(intent ads) or in general is interested in (display ads)

Now:
Business value = Eyeballs * intent

Facebook has lots of Eyeballs but hasn’t come up with a way to monetize or even identify intent, hence it’s not a stellar business just yet (if ever). But it’s easy for them to cut a deal let’s say with Bing to do the general indexing, use it’s data to get to a users context and be a better search engine then Google. Microsoft is well aware off this, Google I don’t know, Facebook I don’t know.

Problem is business is not research and it takes them time to wrap their heads around new insides. Also some people don’t like to see what you know about them. So we’ll see.