SearchEngineZ - News and Ideas

So the article says. Extremely misleading, and the author then extrapolates this to suggest that "Facebook could kill Google".

Here's what is said:

Ross also illustrates how important Facebook has become to Google as a traffic source. Fully 19% of Google sessions now come from Facebook, up from 9% a year ago. At the very least, this will likely give Facebook the leverage to negotiate a sweet referral deal at some point.

Here's the reality:

• Facebook does not link to Google (unless some places a link, or a YouTube video on their page)
• The traffic comes from people finishing whatever they were doing at Facebook, and typing google.com directly into the browser
  
• This result is directly related to the amount of time people spend on such a popular site. It would be the same for other popular sites
• Google would not give Facebook anything for these referrals, because they are purely related to the popularity of Google; Facebook isn't doing anything to help
  

Labels: facebook, google

This week Facebook changed the focus of their layout, making it more to do with updates. At the same time, my friends (not exactly early adopters) started updating twice as often. Given that Facebook is one place to achieve everything, and that they easily have the ability to create an interface to use it via mobile phones, I predict that Twitter has peaked.

Not far behind will probably be the IM services, such as Yahoo Messenger. If they know what is good for them, they'll add in the ability to broadcast updates. My Microsoft Messenger already broadcasts the song I am currently listening to, so it can't be hard.

Both IM servies and Facebook can tweet in ways superior to Twitter, and have many more existing users, and are not under pressure to find a revenue model. I predict that Twitter's number of users will peak on or before May 2009, and this time next year you will not be hearing Twitter mentioned at all, not even in tweets.

Labels: facebook, IM, twitter