Facebook Can Beat Google as 'King of the Web'

There's plenty of buzz about Mark Zuckerberg's launch of a potential "G-mail killer" on Monday, but that's a relatively small battle in what's shaping up to be an epic fight between Facebook and Google to be "king of the Web," writes Ryan Singel at Wired. And Google looks to be the underdog. It may have vanquished Microsoft and Yahoo on search, but "it’s been slowly losing momentum in what may turn out to be the real war—for the ad revenues that come from display."

Google is for the moment the Web's best advertising company, but those days might be numbered. For starters, Facebook is very nearly a "Web inside the Web"—"and Google can’t crawl and analyze much of what happens in there, which is a problem when your goal is to organize the world’s information." Also, "Facebook knows who you are and has the right to use that information because you explicitly gave it to them." As a result, the Zuckerberg camp "now has its sights set on what might be the net’s biggest pot of gold yet: a way of placing ads anywhere on the net with a granularity Google can only dream of—in no small part because it promised its users never to go down that path." For the full essay, click here.
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