COMP 2903 A5 – The Great Wall of Facebook Danny Silver JSOCS, Acadia University

Fred Vogelstein Wired, July 2009 Contributing Editor, Wired Magazine, San Francisco Bay Area Writes about high-tech business and finance Was a senior writer at Fortune magazine Knows the search and online advertising businesses Has been a fellow in economics and business journalism at Columbia University More?

Google Began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin - Ph.D. students at Stanford Univ. - Stanford Digital Library Project Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable info about the page $4.2B profit on $15.8B revenue 90% of revenue comes from those little text advertisements that appear next to search results Characterization: It will tell you what a hundred anonymous people feel about Steven Harper

Google and Brand Advertising Tried to enter the “promised land of online brand advertising” – Coke, McDonalds, Budweiser, etc Challenge: search ads are not as effective at creating demand for stuff users don’t yet know they want -- and that is Brand advertising Online brand advertising: $50B per year Offline brand advertising: $500B per year

Facebook Launched February, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and college roommates and fellow computer science students Initially limited to Harvard students July, 2010: 500 million active users = 1/14 of world population 2009: $275M in revenue Characterization: It will tell you what your best friends feel about Steven Harper

Facebook and a more Personalized Web Mark Zuckerberg is a quite a character Envisions a more humanized web – where people query a social graph of information for: – Best camera, employee, physician Not Google’s cold mathematical search engine Z and Facebook has been very aggressive – Stealing Google employee (9%+)

Connect and Open Stream Connect – able to access Facebook relationships without logging in – Open Stream API – allows developers to create mashups using Facebook activity

Think, Pair, Share So which do you prefer for information – Googles discovery and algorithms or Facebooks social networking? WHY?

So Let’s Run a Test Two groups: – Googlers – Facebookers Using ONLY your respective web tools: – Find the best place to purchase cameras in Nova Scotia – Provide reasons why