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If Facebook has to go, then my money is on Google

Google already has the experience, wherewithal, and technology to bring consumer tools into the enterprise at a profit and to the benefit of the enterprises that adopt Google tech. If Facebook will be relegated to MySpace status, then Google will fill the void.
Written by Christopher Dawson, Contributor

My ZDNet colleagues, Jason Perlow and Jennifer Leggio, have recently been giving serious thought to how they manage their Facebook accounts and the disturbing privacy concerns that have been plaguing the social networking site. When I put on my Google hat on, I see Facebook as a threat to the great and powerful GOOG as our view of communication and what the Web should be shifts to an increasingly social platform. And yet, I can't help but wonder if Google isn't, in fact, ideally suited to be everything in this new social paradigm that Facebook isn't.

Jason wrote a thoughtful piece Friday on why Microsoft, Apple, or Google (in that order) could and should build a Facebook for grownups. Interestingly, Facebook basically is for grownups now. My mom spends more time on Facebook than I do. Almost 90% of Facebook users are 18 and over with the largest number of users falling into the 35-54 age group.

I know what Jason means, of course, despite the demographics. We need a social networking tool without all the nonsense that can meet professional and educational needs. We need a social networking site that can safely and securely connect us to friends (I mean actual friends, not Facebook "friends"), loved ones, coworkers, and peers. Facebook and its countless social gaming apps and fun features that make it a ginourmous time drain will absolutely continue to have a place in our web-driven lives. I have to say, though, that even my 7-year old no longer cares whether the wheat on my farm withers before he gets logged into my account to harvest it for me.

Whether Facebook lives or dies, though, it's time that social media took the next logical step from pervasive social tool to pervasive business/learning/social/communication/networking/everything tool. This can't happen in the context of Facebook as we know it -- Jason has that part right. What I don't think he has right is the possibility of Apple or Microsoft bringing us a truly powerful tool that can reach the ubiquity currently enjoyed by Facebook. Google can. Here's why:

Let's talk about Gmail. Gmail is used by a lot of consumers. It's not important how many, just that plenty of people use it, as well as related services like Google Docs, Calendar, Picasa, Blogger, YouTube, and, to a lesser extent, Buzz and Wave. For some time now, Google has allowed a version of its consumer Gmail, Docs, and Calendar systems to be bundled into a business-class "Google Apps for Your Domain" outsourced groupware product. The interface remains similar, the API is the same, and the tools mature just as fast on both the consumer and domain sides of the business. One just happens to be supported by ads and the other by paid subscriptions (or by philanthropy and the hope for future business in the case of Google Educational Apps).

Friday we learned that Google will begin incorporating more of its consumer tools into its Apps products, increasing its social ecosystem and building upon its strengths in collaboration and content creation. Similarly, Google already has a mechanism for incorporating third-party applications into its Apps products via the Apps Marketplace and increasingly delivers all of its products across a variety of mobile and desktop platforms.

So where am I headed with this? Google has already done with groupware what we need to have done with social media: Take a robust set of tools, perfect them in the consumer space, and then make them completely appropriate for business and educational use. Google has already tried its hand in the social arena with mixed results. While many think of Buzz and its limited success and its own share of privacy concerns when they think about Google and Social in the same sentence, a closer look at Google's other forays into social media suggests a fair amount of sophistication.

Google's new search results speak to social sensibilities better than anything else. The company has tapped users' appetites for multimedia, social streams, and new media. YouTube is also increasingly social, with more streamlined sharing capabilities, growing communities, and vibrant discussions via video and text. Even Buzz, despite its hiccups, suggests a vision for tying together messaging, documents, multimedia, and social streams. Google has repeatedly called the Web the platform upon which all of their products are based and has pointed to their origins in the Web as an inherent strength for developing and managing new products.

Google has far too much to lose to make too many more Buzz-style privacy mistakes and everything to gain by maintaining trust and deploying new, powerful, user-friendly tools like those upon which they've built their reputation (and won our loyal usage). Social is the next logical step. Microsoft, despite claims of being "all in" with respect to the cloud, is too entrenched in the desktop and the enterprise and would hardly want to cannibalize SharePoint sales for the sake of a full-blown, cloud-based, multi-purpose social platform. As Jason suggested, an Apple iFriends application would never be platform agnostic and would therefore never see success outside the iPad/iPod crowd. Google, on the other hand, merely needs to push the evolution of its Apps platforms to create a social juggernaut with which an insecure, Zynga-dominated Facebook would struggle to compete outside the market made up of very casual (or very careless) users.

I'm not deleting my Facebook account just yet. After all, I need to keep an eye on what my kids are doing and, for now, it remains an important communication tool for friends, family, businesses, and organizations. I'll be cleaning up my account, though, and creating some fan pages through which I can direct and control traffic more carefully. I'll also be watching Buzz more closely, along with Google's continued integration of a larger ecosystem of services into Apps. I think we're at a tipping point here and my money's on Google to step in with something much better for both average and power users of the social Web than Facebook. That is, if Google can be genuinely convincing (or just plain genuine) about the superiority of its own privacy practices.

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