Search Engine Land: Big Deal: Facebook Emerges As Major Player In Mobile And Location-Based Services
TechCrunch: Facebook Revamps The Mobile Log-In Process With Single Sign-On
BGR: Facebook has 200 million active mobile users, improves iOS and Android applications
TechCrunch: Facebook Gives All Developers Access To Full Set Of Places APIs (Including Their Venue Database)
Inside Facebook: Facebook Launches Local Deal Service for Places
Image via WikipediaFacebook's out to conquer the web. Facebook is the biggest competitor that Google ever had. It is not Microsoft. To compete with Google, you needed to be online, and Microsoft is not exactly online. And this competition did not come from search, it did not come from the government stepping in with some anti-monopoly lawsuit. The Google Wave guy Lars Rasmussen jumping the Google ship to go to Facebook is highly symbolic. (A Facebook Browser? A Facebook Operating System?) Google lacks social in its DNA. Information and social are antithetical to each other. To be excellent at information you necessarily have to be lousy at social. The information is an attempt at the objective. The social is by definition subjective.
So far the Facebook ship has stayed steady as it has tried to emerge on top of every possible emerging trend. There used to be Twitter envy, there used to be FriendFeed envy. Now you see FourSquare and GroupOn envy. Twitter is still around and strong. I believe FourSquare and GroupOn both have Twitter like viability. Facebook can do location, Facebook can do coupons, but it will not get the whole deck, or even the big part of the deck. Coupons smell like money, so I don't blame Facebook getting on top of it. But this gravy train is big enough for many players to play and emerge just fine.
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