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Theme 5
One development that is clearly of interest for the near future is the battle between Google and Facebook to dominate our activity on the web. Contrast Google,which uses logical algorithms to help us find stuff with Facebook's strategy of tapping into our relationships and encouraging us to use our friends as resources for information.Which one do you think will emerge as dominant? Explain your reasons for your choice. Include a discussion of which can be most successfully "monetized",which makes better use of our personal data to "help us" find stuff, and which has the best strategies to lure us and hold our attention to the site.

Even as I try to write this final I am struggling in my very own battle of Facebook and Google. Google has been so researched and thought out and scientifically improved to figure out the way people search things and the way we think. Google's algorithms record feedback from users to find out which links they selected and how they can help future users searching for the same thing. Google has fostered many relationships with businesses in this way. Although Google may deny it, they allow the highest paying website to be listed first on the pages of results, making it more likely to be clicked on. Facebook plays a different game. Instead of working off of our needs for information, it lures us in with promise of friendship and popularity. The reason we go on facebook is purely for entertainment purposes. There we go, log in, and just browse around to see what are friends, whether close or practical strangers, have been up to. And yet we spend HOURS on end doing just this, as well as updating our own pages for other people to browse and admire. Facebook is great at keeping our attention however. The live news feed keeps you updated every second about what one of your "friends" has just done- what they commented on. Liked, uploaded, made their status, became a fan of, or are attending. Facebook also has a feature that allows you to view something of interest between multiple friends. For instance, if somebody just uploaded a picture of that hideous face John made, and all your friends start commenting, it will come up on your home page as something you may be interested in that has gotten a lot of feedback from your friends. It now also displays people on your friends list that you haven't contacted recently or advertisements based on what you put in the Interests section of your profile.
I think that Google is probably the most efficiently run website out there, but Facebook puts up quite a competition for popularity and user-attractiveness, that is- its attractiveness to users. At first I believed that Google had way more connections, and it probably does, with all the endorsements it does and sponsoring. But Facebook also has all of those applications which stem from businesses as well that it is endorsing. As for who will be dominant... I may be on Google's side. I think Facebook is more easily monetized because it's not a necessity and people may pay to connect friends. Maybe they'll charge per usage time... But i don't believe that Google will be able to charge people for searching for information. They seem to be very successful, monetarily speaking, so I do not see where being a free service hurts them in the way that it brings in millions and millions of searches per day.