Google announced “Buzz,” their new social media aggregator something-or-other this afternoon. Currently the media is reporting on it as a “Facebook killer,” and that may even be Google’s intention, but I think it could be more than that.
Facebook is a frequently treated as a communications platform – you post content and your friends respond to it. It has what I’d consider three separate channels of communication – chat, wall posts, and the inbox – each which represents a different concept of what communication can be. Yet there are a million other ways to communicate – mail, telephone, SMS, AIM, email, twitter, blog comments – many of which are definitely not going anywhere and make facebook’s feature set completely redundant.
Facebook’s real value is in the profiles. This may seem counterintuitive – I certainly look at the news feed a lot more than i look at any one profile – but think of it this way: every news item is really a change or an addition to that persons profile. The profile is a pointer to that users identity – it is a conceptual address that replaces all of the physical (eg. 113 Main St.) or mechanical (eg 617/555-9064) addresses for something that is related to that person with the identity of the person himself.
So rather than trying to destroy Facebook, Google Buzz should be looking to supersede it – absorb it, commoditize it. Make it so that people say “I was checking out her Facebook on Buzz the other day.”
Facebook’s eventual fall from grace will be this – it tries to hold every piece of information within itself. Conceptually, this is like the early internet providers like AOL or CompuServe having a “walled garden”, a subset of the internet that they allowed their users to consume. Eventually this system came to an end and the whole internet was opened up to them. For the most part, people dont access AOL’s proprietary content anymore (im not sure such a thing even exists) – they see the web through Google.
The best parts of AOL still exist today – that is to say their Instant Messaging protocol – but AOL is nothing like the dominant force it was in 1995. Likewise, Facebook will probably have an even more feature-bloated portal five years from now, but the only really valuable part of its property will be the profiles and the reliable identities that they represent and establish.