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The thing I found most interesting about this interview is just how badly Peter Norvig has failed to understand what Facebook is all about - I don't use Faceboo
by demallien 16y ago
The thing I found most interesting about this interview is just how badly Peter Norvig has failed to understand what Facebook is all about - I don't use Facebook so that friends can give me recommendations about what camera to buy - I use Facebook because knowing what my friend Sally got up to this weekend is far more interesting to me than what Britney Spears has been up to. I might be interesting in knowing what camera she used to take that brilliant photo of Jim under the fireworks, but that's about as close as it gets.
This has a huge implication for the value of Facebook - they know who I am, really. They know where I live, my age, my sex, and they can even tell what sort of activities I like. Google tries to guess this information from my page view habits, but they often get it wrong, big time. Here's an example - if I get a dating site ad on Facebook it correctly identifies me as a woman and throws up pictures of guys. If that ad is being served up by Google, I get identified as a man because of all the time I spend on tech sites, so the same ad has pictures of women in it. Facebook gives me ads about clothes, Google almost never does.
I suspect that Google's core business is at significant risk here. People are spending more and more time in the Facebook universe, those 'Like' buttons have popped up all over the Web, and that spells trouble for Google. It'll be interesting to see how they respond, but I for one won't be buying any more stock in Google for a while.
- jakevoytko 16y agoI think Norvig looks at Facebook as a lost opportunity for data mining: Facebook isn't used as a recommendation engine any more than Google is used as an ad company, yet all user actions always gets piped back to ad results. If John is friends with Sally (who is kind of cute, and kind of a photography geek, and recently bought a good midrange point-and-shoot), John subconsciously wants that brand to show up somewhere in the recommendations, even if it is too expensive. But Google doesn't know that John's friends have bought that camera, because who posts what camera they bought on their Google profile? If Facebook has the ad instead of Google, then Facebook might get the all-important click.
- msg 16y agoThat is right. Norvig doesn't see what Facebook is good at and ask how it will make money. He turns the question on its head, looks to a successful business model and asks how Facebook could be used for it. And it is an uphill battle for Facebook to monetize in this fashion. I think what we've seen so far is that Facebook is about creating social spaces, not solving problems, so it really can't be used that effectively as a recommendation engine. Facebook doesn't have a great way to seek rent on these social spaces because they've built their user base on free service. So where is the money going to come from? Probably selling user data to corporations.
- senki 16y agoFacebook knows what you told them about yourself. Google observe what you actually doing, and if you often visit tech sites then they should show you tech related ads instead of clothes and this is spot-on. The dating ad with women is just noise in their system (after all, if you are frequent in tech sites, you are statistically male... :)).
- TheSOB88 16y agoAre you trying to say that Google is more correct than Facebook, even though it's completely backwards wrong?
- chadgeidel 16y agoThat's been my experience. Google's ads (in search and Gmail) have been consistently better-targeted to me than Facebook's ads. The only ads I get on Facebook are dating ads (and insulting ones at that). Full Disclosure: I'm not running an ad-blocker, but I am running a hosts file, so I still see Google and Facebook ads, but maybe not "all of them".
- TheSOB88 16y agoIn this example, Google's clearly wrong. Facebook has an advantage in this arena. Why argue?