
via www.guardian.co.uk The Guardian is reporting that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is warning against the dangers that both Facebook and Apple bring to the Internet. While it's not a surprise that I don't particularly like Google, he's making a very good point here. Facebook is a walled garden, and what happens in Facebook stays in Facebook - unless you're stupid or transparent enough not to mind if your status updates are available to the world.
I'm firmly convinced that Facebook isn't satisfied with being one of the biggest players on the Internet - it wants to BE the internet. We've recently seen moves to develop a proper search function at Facebook, and the recent acquisition of Instagram also shows quite clearly that the company wants to grab as much mobile traffic as it possibly can. I can easily see a situation in which a newcomer to the net gets told to create a Facebook account, and they find their friends, discussion groups, images, factual data, web pages for companies and organisations - of course they're going to think that it's the internet. As an aside this is why it's a total insanity for any organisation to block, ban or otherwise censor information professionals access to the web. Facebook is now the size that the Internet itself was in 2004, so it's well on its way to achieving that aim.
Then if we take a look at Apple, with the huge number of apps at their disposal - Google can't get at any of that data either. Increasingly I'm finding that when I want something while I'm out, I'll use an app to get it. If I need to know the football scores - there's an app for that. Need to check the price of a product - there's an app for that as well. Need to... well, you get the idea. Given that we're moving towards the mobile era at a rate of knots we have two competing systems, both of which are freezing Google out of the game. No wonder they're running scared. When you then get a killer Facebook app for the phone, it doesn't take a genius to see Google losing it's entire relevance for people.
Of course, we have to look at the other side of the coin as well, and Brin is being ever so slightly disingenius himself. He's busy trying to create his own garden, whereby people stay within the Google fold, but the problem that he's got is the success of Google as a search engine and its almost total failure at everything else (Gmail apart). Google is completely tied to the Web 1 version of the net, with the value and importance of websites as being the place where all the action is. Only of course now it's not. So what does Google do? It injects its own results into the information it provides users, ranking its own G+ data above that of Twitter and Facebook. That reduces their own morale highground to the size of a molehill built on shaky foundations.
Meanwhile the average punter - that's you and me folks, is left being pushed from pillar to post as the cattle the ranchers are fighting over. None of these corporations are your friends, none of them care a jot about you other than what they can make from you. While this is a bleak scenario, the silver lining is the fact that people trust information professionals, and I firmly believe that part of our role is get people to at least understand what is happening on the internet, and to make the point over and over again that if they can't trust Google, Facebook or Apple, they can at least trust their friendly librarian.
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