Warning: Undefined array key "adf" in /www/wwwroot/tmter.com/wp-content/plugins/rejected-wp-keyword-link-rejected/wp_similarity.php on line 41
Warning: Undefined array key "sim_pages" in /www/wwwroot/tmter.com/wp-content/plugins/rejected-wp-keyword-link-rejected/wp_similarity.php on line 42
编辑：AndyTsai
来源：新浪财经
最新一期《财富》杂志于11月正式出刊，本期封面文章是《谷歌和Facebook的终极PK》。一个是高科技产业的霸主，一个是网络时代的新贵，为了生存它们在社交网络展开了殊死搏斗。是老骥伏枥的拉里佩奇将Facebook扼杀在摇篮里，还是意气风发的扎克伯格把谷歌拍死在沙滩上？到底鹿死谁手，请看下文分解。
原文地址：
http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/03/technology/facebook_google_fight.fortune/index.htm
英文版：
Paul Adams is one of Silicon Valley’s most wanted. He’s an intellectually minded product designer with square-framed glasses, a thick Irish accent, and a cult following of passionate techies. As one of Google’s lead social researchers, he helped dream up the big idea behind the company’s new social network, Google+: those flexible circles that let you group friends easily under monikers like “real friends” or “college buddies.” He never got to help bring his concept to consumers, though. In a master talent grab last December, Facebook lured him 10 miles east to Palo Alto to help design social advertisements. On his blog, Adams explained, “Google values technology, not social science.”
In the long history of tech rivalries, rarely has there been a battle as competitive as the raging war between the web’s wonder twins. They will stop at nothing to win over whip-smart folks like Adams, amass eyeballs, and land ad dollars. There’s no public trash talking à la the Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500) vs. HP (HPQ, Fortune 500) smackdown, nor are the battle lines drawn as clearly as they were when Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) took on Netscape, but the stakes are immense. These companies are fighting to see which of them will determine the future of the web — and the outcome will affect the way we get information, communicate, and buy and sell.
Facebook and Google: Head-to-Head – Click on the picture for more.
In one corner is Facebook, the reigning champion of the social web, trying to cement its position as the owner of everyone’s online identity. In the other is Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), the company that organized the world’s information and showed us how to find it, fighting to remain relevant as the Internet of hyperlinks gives way to an Internet of people.
Although Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and its CEO since April, was born just 11 years before Mark Zuckerberg, his counterpart at Facebook, the two belong to different Internet generations with different worldviews. In Page’s web, everything starts with a search. You search for news or for a pair of shoes or to keep up with your favorite celebrity. If you want to learn about a medical condition or decide which television to buy, you search. In that world, Google’s algorithms, honed over more than a decade, respond almost perfectly. But in recent years the web has tilted gradually, and perhaps inexorably, toward Zuckerberg’s world. There, rather than search for a news article, you wait for your friends to tell you what to read. They tell you what movies they enjoyed, what brands they like, and where to eat sushi.
Facebook is squarely at the center of this new universe, and much of what people do online these days starts there. But Facebook’s masterstroke has been to spread itself across the web and allow others to tap your network of friends. As a result, thousands of websites and apps have essentially become satellites that orbit around Facebook. You can now go to Yelp to find out what your Facebook friends say about the new coffeehouse down the street, visit Spotify to let them pick music playlists for you, or play Zynga games with them. To make matters worse for Page, much of this social activity can’t be seen by Google’s web-trolling algorithms, so every day they (and by extension, Google) become a little bit less accurate and relevant.
This shift to a more social web changes everything for businesses and consumers alike. Among the first industries to be rocked: advertising. Google may capture 41% of today’s $31 billion U.S. online advertising market, including the lion’s share of the search-ad market. But growth in search advertising is slowing, and advertisers are putting more of their limited dollars into Facebook, with its 800 million users, many of whom spend more time on Facebook than on any other site. (See chart at the bottom of the page) Facebook’s display-ad revenue is expected to grow 81% this year, while Google’s display-ad dollars will rise an estimated 34%. Google and Facebook would have you believe there is room for each to drive forward with unlimited success, but don’t be fooled. As Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan explains, “It’s highly unlikely that either Google or Facebook could grow by the billions that investors expect in the display market without engaging directly and stealing market share from the other.”
Like Bill Gates a decade or so earlier, Page is seeing his company’s grip on the tech world loosening. So he’s fighting back with a mammoth effort to grab a piece of the social web. His first substantial act as Google’s new CEO was to amp up the considerable financial and engineering mojo the company had aimed at Facebook’s turf by releasing Google+. It’s not Google’s first social initiative, but it’s the one that folks aren’t laughing at, and Google says 40 million people have signed up in only four months. Across town Zuckerberg knows Google+ is the first credible threat Facebook has faced since it sailed past MySpace to become the world’s No. 1 social network. (For Facebook there are more than bragging rights at stake: Anything that tarnishes its halo could impact its long-awaited initial public offering with a valuation that is expected to top $80 billion.) Not surprisingly, shortly after Google+ made its debut, Zuckerberg flipped on a pink neon sign at headquarters with the word lockdown, signaling that employees were on notice to work around the clock on, among other things, replicating some of the most praised Google+ features.
But defensive moves are not Zuckerberg’s style, and in September, at the company’s F8 developers event, he unleashed a sea of new features that alter the current service radically. And it’s expected the company will launch an ad network eventually that will harness all those social actions to help advertisers target consumers better across the web. Smartly deployed, it could further threaten Google’s position as the king of online advertising.
So while most of us spend our days casually toggling back and forth between our Gmail accounts and our Facebook newsfeeds, down in the heart of the San Francisco Peninsula it’s war. Zuckerberg served free food this summer to willing workers on the weekends. Page is pushing his team to add features to Google+ at a furious pace: more than 100 in the first 90 days. The decisions that are being made right now — product launches, advertising plays — will determine which company prevails.
Larry Page was not pleased. It was a weekend day last spring, and Page, 38, was playing around with an early prototype of Google+ on his Android phone. He found it too cumbersome to post photos he had just taken. He called Vic Gundotra, Google’s social czar, to complain. Gundotra tried to push back, explaining why the Google+ team decided on the approach it had taken. Page insisted that photos be uploaded with one click. At Google, what Page asks for, he gets. Gundotra ordered his team to rebuild the photo-uploading feature, and Page now gushes about the technology. “It is a totally magical experience,” he said recently, as he described how easy it is to post photos from Android to Google+.
In many ways, Google+ is Larry Page’s social network. Early work on Google+ predated Page’s ascent to the top post, but he has been intimately involved with the project from the start. In the initial months, Page dropped by every Friday at 11 a.m. for the group’s weekly product reviews. To keep close tabs, Page moved his office and much of the executive suite to the building where the Google+ team was sequestered. He blessed the project with massive resources, making it one of the largest engineering endeavors Google has undertaken in its 13-year history, and he elevated Gundotra to the post of senior vice president, reporting directly to him. Page also tied a portion of the bonuses of thousands of Googlers to how well the company did in social.
Google+ is also the first test of Page’s plan to transform Google into the nimbler, more accountable company it once was, and in the process avoid the Innovators’ Dilemma, the paralysis that grips so many successful companies. In the Google+ project, the company’s freewheeling and sometimes chaotic approach to innovation was cast aside — replaced with a more top-down style. Allowing a thousand flowers to bloom may still be important at Google, says Sergey Brin, the other co-founder, but “once they do bloom, you want to put together a coherent bouquet.”
Maybe some discipline is what Google’s social ambitions needed. Google’s previous attacks on Facebook’s turf were an embarrassment. Orkut, Google’s first social network, was born alongside Facebook in 2004 but is largely irrelevant outside of Brazil. Open Social, a Google-led effort in 2007 to rally MySpace and other social networks into an alliance to balance the clout of Facebook, flopped. Two years later Google introduced Wave, only to kill it after a few months, and Buzz, a 2010 attempt to shoehorn Gmail users into a social network, quickly turned into Google’s biggest social faux pas: Buzz exposed people’s Gmail contacts to others, triggering a Federal Trade Commission investigation that forced Google to revamp its privacy policies and accept government monitoring for 20 years.
The Buzz fiasco was a wake-up call at Google. Some of its most high-profile engineers started making the case that the social web posed a vital threat to Google. As the web was being rebuilt around people — and, in particular, around Facebook’s graph of human relationships — Google could end up on the sidelines, its relevance eroding by the day. The message rattled Google’s top brass, and an ambitious project — called Emerald Sea — not only to create a credible rival to Facebook but also to transform Google’s existing products around social media, quickly took shape. (Gundotra picked the name Emerald Sea to suggest both new horizons and stormy waters.)
After more than a year of gestation, Google finally introduced Google+ in June. The result? A social network that cloned much of what people like about Facebook and eliminated much of what they hate about Facebook. You’ll find familiar home and profile pages, tabs for photos and games, and of course the endless updates from friends. Google’s +1 button works much like Facebook’s Like. But where Facebook is perpetually accused of running roughshod over people’s privacy preferences, Google+ made it very easy to decide who can see what users post on the site. Facebook lacked a good way to separate workmates from classmates from real friends, so Google+ was built around Circles, an intuitive way to group people in buckets. Facebook takes 30% of the revenue that app developers like Zynga make on its platform, so Google+ said it would take only 5% for now. Since the launch, Google has rolled out more than 100 new features, and Page says there is much more to come. In Silicon Valley, where everyone had given up on the idea that Google could compete with Facebook, Google+ caught everyone — including Facebook loyalists — by surprise. “Google+ was impressive,” says Joe Green, one of Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommates and the founder of Causes, an application built to run on Facebook.
Until recently, the most popular person on Google+, with 598,000 followers and counting, was Mark Zuckerberg. But he has yet to make a public post, and indeed he’d prefer not to discuss Google+ at all. When pressed at a July event, he called it only a “validation as to how the next five years are going to play out.” (Translation: Uh, they’re copying us.)
However, inside the Palo Alto office where more than 750 engineers regularly pass by the small glass conference room in which Zuckerberg, 27, holds court, Facebook employees put in some serious overtime during the summer lockdown. This had happened only once before in recent years at Facebook: After word leaked that Google was starting work on a “Facebook killer” in summer 2010, Zuckerberg called on engineers to work nights and weekends for 60 days to revamp key social features like photos, groups, and events. Just as it did then, the cafeteria opened up on evenings and weekends this summer, and children dropped in for dinners and good-night hugs before their parents logged back on for late nights. By September, Facebook had released a slew of new features like better grouping tools to mirror those Google+ circles. Says one member of the product and engineering team: “[Google] can throw all the money in the world, including hundreds of people, at this. So people were, like, This is serious, and we should take it seriously.”
That anxiety wasn’t simply channeled into building a better product. In May, Facebook secretly hired public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to plant anti-Google stories in papers and blogs, a ham-fisted move that backfired when journalists discovered Facebook was Burson’s client. The company defended its concerns about Google’s privacy violations but took the flak for bad judgment.
The irony, of course, is that Facebook and Google both are in a constant struggle to respect users’ privacy while mining as much personal information as possible for the companies’ advertisers. All that social information we plug into Facebook when we “like” a pair of shoes on Zappos or update our status about future wedding plans helps the company serve us up ads for things we’re more likely to want. This has made Facebook into the go-to advertising platform for big marketers hoping to do brand advertising at scale on the web. As a result, even though Facebook’s revenue is minuscule compared with Google’s, it is growing at a much faster rate. It is expected to surge to $4.3 billion this year, or more than double the $2 billion it had last year, according to eMarketer. In contrast, analysts predict that Google’s revenue will grow just 30%, to $38 billion.
Zuckerberg is obsessed with figuring out how to amass more data by getting more people to spend more time sharing more things with their Facebook friends. At the F8 event in September, he unveiled something called a timeline to replace Facebook’s aging profile pages. “Imagine expressing the story of your life,” Zuckerberg explained. To demonstrate, he popped up his own Facebook timeline, where a vertical line scrolled backward through his personal history, curating all the posts he’d ever made on the site to bring to the surface the most important items and encouraging him to add posts and photos going all the way back to the May 14, 1984, post: Born, Dobbs Ferry, New York. In effect, Zuckerberg plans to coax us into making Facebook our living digital scrapbooks. Imagine the hours users may log uploading photos and labeling events from the lost decades B.F. (Before Facebook).
But the boldest move at F8 was not Zuckerberg’s flashy redesign but rather deeper social integration with other services like Netflix (NFLX) and Spotify. To register for Spotify, newcomers must now use their Facebook credentials. The upside is that you can find and listen to your friends’ playlists on Spotify or on Facebook directly. The downside is your musical tastes are revealed to the world (i.e., Sean Parker is listening to Florence + the Machine). This new stream of social data could prove invaluable over time. Until now, although many web publishers offered users the option to publish their actions — articles they read, shoes they buy — on Facebook, most people took a pass. In the new model, sharing becomes opt-out rather than opt-in, and Facebook could become the sudden recipient of a good deal more information about what we do online. Eventually, the company could use the data to sell even more targeted ads both on and off the site. If Google’s AdWords and AdSense are the de facto tools for helping advertisers reach large numbers of people who know what they’re looking for, social ads will be the tool for helping people discover new things.
The war
One day in late October, tech blogs started buzzing about the latest bit of news on the social web: Zuckerberg had lost his place as the most followed Google+ user. Who edged him out? None other than Larry Page. Trivial, perhaps, but it’s hard not to think that the news lit up smiles across the Googleplex. Neither Google nor Facebook likes to talk about competing with each other (and neither company would make their CEOs available for this story), but battles are raging on multiple fronts, and both sides celebrate even the smallest victory.
Nowhere is keeping score easier than in the battle for talent, where every engineer or executive who defects from one company or the other is easily tabulated. On that front the battle has been a lopsided affair. Look through the ranks of Facebook, from upper management to lowly interns, and you’ll bump into ex-Googlers like Adams, the social researcher, at every turn. Four of Facebook’s 11 top executives hail from Google, including COO Sheryl Sandberg and David Fischer, the advertising and operations chief.
These numbers, however, don’t tell the full story of a battle that began as far back as 2007 and has only intensified since. Facebook’s weapons of choice? Its cachet as the hottest Valley company — and its potential to mint millionaires when it finally goes public. Google has fought back with money, lots of it. In some cases Google offered top engineers or execs more than $10 million in equity and cash if they stayed, said an executive directly involved in the talent wars. Word spread quickly, and many Googlers did what rational people would do: They got an offer from Facebook just so they could get a big raise at Google. “It created an un-Googley environment,” says a senior manager who left Google recently. “They like to be merit-based.” So in January, Google tried a different approach: It lavished a giant 10% raise on its entire workforce. It also shifted a large chunk of employee bonuses into base pay. As a result, many people saw their paychecks increase by 15% or even 20%.
But if Google is playing defense on the talent war, it is clearly playing offense in the battle for eyeballs. Its most powerful weapon is its status as the dominant Internet company. In September, for example, when it opened up Google+ to everyone, following a 90-day trial period, it unleashed the kind of promotion that even the biggest brands would envy: A large blue arrow on its homepage pointed the tens of millions who visit it daily to a Google+ tab. Traffic on the site spiked immediately. In addition to Google.com, Google plans to promote Google+, day in and day out, to the hundreds of millions of people who use services like Gmail, Maps, and YouTube; and to weave it into millions of Android handsets. Says Dick Costolo, the chief executive of Twitter: “There is no doubt they are going to be able to pull in massive numbers of users.”
Naturally, it’s Google’s power to pull in those users that worries Facebook the most. For years executives there have said that they are confident they can beat Google on a level playing field. But they fear that, like Microsoft in an earlier era, Google will use its power to peddle Google+, and not always fairly. Some tactics, like promotions on Google.com, are effective and uncontroversial. Others, like Google’s ability to use its search engine to promote Google+ ahead of other social services, could prove more problematic. Google has not yet done so with Google+, but it has done just that with other services, like its maps, prompting rivals to cry foul. Google may think twice before engaging in such tactics, as it is already under a government antitrust investigation. Yet with mobile as the next battleground, Google may also find ways to build many Google+ features right into Android phones and tablets, making it harder for rivals to compete.
That last point is not lost on Zuckerberg. It has prompted him to seek closer ties with Google’s biggest rival in mobile: Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500). The two companies have held multiple rounds of discussions, according to people with knowledge of the talks. But they have yet to find a compelling way to collaborate, perhaps because their courtship got off to a rocky start. Last year Facebook rebuffed Apple’s attempt to connect Ping, a new social network built around iTunes, with Facebook, purportedly for technical reasons. It was a rare public rebuke for Apple, and Steve Jobs personally called some reporters to voice his displeasure. That Apple chose to bake Twitter, not Facebook, into the most recent version of its mobile operating system has not helped. Still, the two companies continue to talk, knowing full well that an alliance could help them fend off a common enemy.
We know what you’re probably thinking: If this is a war, who’s going to win? The answer is not straightforward. Google has two goals with social media: One is to slow the momentum of Facebook; the other is to use data from Google+ to improve things like search, maps, and ads. Both Gundotra and Page say the latter goal is the more important one. “We can make search better,” Gundotra says. “We can make YouTube and Gmail better. We can make our ads more relevant.” He later adds: “Google+ will touch every aspect of Google.”
To meet its goals, Google doesn’t need to best Facebook, but it needs to become a credible No. 2. Think Avis to Facebook’s Hertz. That’s a ways off. “At this point, it’s more like Thrifty Car Rental,” says Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land. To get there, Google needs to drink even more of the social Kool-Aid than it has. Consider this: In October a tech blog reported that several top Google officials, including Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman, had not even set up their own accounts on Google+. A few days later Schmidt’s account quietly appeared on the site. Google also needs something else: a value proposition that is different from Facebook’s and that compels users to switch in large numbers — or at least to be active on both sites. At this point, it is not clear how many of the 40 million people with Google+ accounts actually use the site. Google won’t say. And when asked why anyone should switch to Google+, executives there say again and again that online sharing is broken (tell that to Facebook’s 800 million members) and that with Circles, Google+ users can share as they do in the real world (never mind that Facebook has matched that capability).
For Facebook, the early successes of Google+ mean Zuckerberg can no longer afford to screw up. In the past, Facebook’s frequent product missteps and privacy snafus were by and large forgiven or forgotten. From now on, Google+ will stand at the ready, more than happy to welcome any disgruntled Facebook users — not to mention their friends. In other words, as he soldiers on, Zuckerberg must now keep an eye on Page and his troops. Yes, Zuckerberg may feel good about Facebook’s gaping lead in users and about having poached dozens of Google’s prized brainiacs. But Page has had no problem replenishing Google’s ranks. In the most recent quarter, Google added nearly 2,600 employees. That’s almost as many people as work at Facebook, and they have a clear mandate: to turn Google into a superpower of the social web.
This article is from the November 21, 2011 issue of Fortune.
中文版：
作为曾经的谷歌社会化交互设计领域的领军人物，保罗-亚当斯在硅谷非常抢手，是他帮助谷歌设计了全新的社交网络Google+。使用这个社交网，你可以把自己的好友圈子进行分类，比如将好友区分成真正的朋友和大学校友等等。但是他并没有在谷歌等到自己的想法被推向消费者，因为去年十二月，亚当斯被Facebook招致麾下。在解释为什么离开谷歌时，亚当斯说：谷歌更重视技术，而忽视了社会科学。
在科技对决的历史上，很少有像这对神奇双胞胎这样竞争如此惨烈的。他们不惜一切代价招纳像亚当斯这样的能人、想尽一切办法吸引人们的眼球，同时在广告上投入了大量的资金。以前人们并不关心Oracle和HP或者微软和网景之间的竞争，但是这次不同，它们之间的竞争影响太大，将决定互联网的未来，并且最终会影响我们获取信息，沟通以及买卖的方式。一方是Facebook，作为现在社交网络的霸主，它希望掌管所有人的网络身份；另一方是谷歌，这家收集信息并告诉我们如何搜索这些信息的公司，正努力让链接的互联网和人文的互联网找到交集。
谷歌的拉里-佩奇比扎克伯格大11岁，他们分属不同互联网时代，有着不同的世界观。在佩奇的时代，所有的一切都从搜索开始，你需要搜索新闻、一双鞋或者是了解你所喜欢名人的最新八卦，任何你想知道的事情都需要搜索，在这个世界里，谷歌磨砺了十年并铸就了辉煌。但是现在，互联网正无情的进入扎克伯格的世界，在这里你不需要搜索新闻，因为你的朋友会告诉你该读什么、该看什么电影、该买什么牌子的衣服或者去哪里吃寿司。
Facebook是这个世界的核心，现在人们上网都从打开Facebook开始。更绝的是Facebook把自己的影响力扩展到了整个互联网世界，让别人利用你的朋友圈子，结果是现在很多网站以及应用程序都变成了围绕Facebook运转的卫星。你可以到Yelp寻找你的facebook好友提到的街角新开的咖啡屋，你也可以访问Spotify让他们帮你挑选音乐曲目，你还可以和他们一同去Zynga玩网络游戏。更让佩奇发愁的是，很多社交活动无法通过搜索获得，它正在被网民边缘化。
这种变化也影响了商业和消费，首当其冲的就是广告业。如今美国310亿美元的在线广告市场中，谷歌占据了41%，其中包括搜索广告市场的绝大部分。但是搜索广告的增长率在放缓，广告商正将有限的资金投放到Facebook，因为它有8亿的用户，而大部分人上Facebook比上其他网页的时间更多。Facebook演示广告的收入今年预计将增长81%，而谷歌仅为34%。你真的相信这两个公司能在广告市场上实现双赢嘛？别傻了。专家表示，这两个公司不可能保持广告收入一直增长，同时还不相互挤占各自的份额。
和比尔-盖茨十年前一样，佩奇的公司正在失去对互联网世界的控制，但是他不想束手就擒。作为谷歌的新任CEO，他的第一把火就是投入大量的人力物力开发Google+，希望借此和Facebook一较高低。这不是谷歌第一次开发社交网络，但确是第一次动真格的，在四个月内就有4000万用户注册。很快扎克伯格就意识到，自从Facebook超越MySpace成为社交网站头牌后，这是他头一次遇到真正的对手。Google+问世后不久，他就要求自己的员工夜以继日的工作，模仿Google+最受好评的新功能。但是被动防御不是扎克伯格的风格，今年9月，Facebook增加了大量的新功能，彻底改变了现在的服务方式。扎克伯格将启动一个新的广告网络，通过这个网络来整合所有的社交活动，这样可以帮助广告商更好的吸引目标消费者。这个新战略很可能威胁谷歌在线广告老大的地位。
当我们每天在自己的Gmail账户和Facebook新消息之间来回切换的时候，旧金山正爆发着一场惨烈的战争。整个夏天，扎克伯格为自愿在周末加班的工人提供免费食物；而佩奇鞭打着自己的团队以疯狂的速度给Google+增加新功能。结果90天，他们增加了100项功能。不断推出新产品，然后迅速推广，两家公司正在进行着你死我活的殊死搏斗。
谷歌在行动
春天的一个周末，拉里-佩奇郁闷的用他的安卓手机摆弄着Google+的原型。他发现上传自己刚拍的照片非常繁琐，于是把谷歌的社交网络主管维克-古多塔找来询问。古多塔解释了团队的设计初衷，但是佩奇坚持应该轻轻一点就可以上传图片。在谷歌，佩奇说一不二，没办法古多塔开始组织力量对上传系统进行修改。最近佩奇已经开始到处炫耀从安卓系统上传图片到Google+有多么轻松，他说这简直是魔法般的体验。
在很多方面，Google+就是拉里-佩奇的社交网络。早在成为CEO之前，佩奇就开始关注Google+的开发，从这个项目启动开始就全程参与。最初，他只是每周五参加项目例行的工作会议，后来他干脆就在Google+开发小组的办公楼里住了下来。他为这个项目投入了大量的资金，并建立了谷歌成立13年以来最大的工程团队进行研发，还把古多塔升为高级副总裁，直接向他汇报工作。更有甚者，佩奇将数千名谷歌员工的奖金和社交网络的运行业绩挂钩。
Google+是佩奇为谷歌进行转型的第一次尝试，他希望谷歌可以吸取其他企业的教训，继续保持公司的创新能力。在Google+的研发过程中，他们摒弃了传统自由发挥的创新模式，而更多的采用自上而下的模式。谷歌的另一创始人谢尔盖-布林说：在谷歌，百花齐放当然很重要，但是当这些花怒放以后，你必须把他们扎成一堆。
也许谷歌的社交网络雄心确实需要好好的规划，因为他们前几次和Facebook过招，最后都成为了人们的笑柄。谷歌的第一个社交网络是Orkut，尽管和Facebook同一年诞生，但是现在除了巴西以外，无人问津。2007年谷歌又联合MySpace和其他几家社交网络一起推出了Open Social，希望抗衡Facebook，同样以惨败收场。两年后的Wave很快也胎死腹中。2010年，谷歌推出了Buzz，他们希望把Gmail用户强行组成一个网络，很快联邦贸易委员会认为谷歌随意公开的人们的Gmail信息，因此要求谷歌修改隐私条例，并接受政府20年的监管。
Buzz的惨败彻底打醒了谷歌，公司高层意识到如果再不采取行动，谷歌将越来越被边缘化。因此他们开始了一个雄心勃勃的计划：Emerald Sea。这个计划不仅仅要和Facebook一决雌雄，而且还要对现有的产品进行彻底的改造，加快谷歌的转型速度。
经过一年的酝酿，谷歌终于在今年六月推出了Google+。结果是这个新的社交网络复制了人们最喜欢的Facebook的功能，同时摒弃了人们最不喜欢的Facebook的功能。你可以找到似曾相识的页面，照片和游戏的标示以及来自好友不断更新的内容。谷歌的+1功能和Facebook的Like类似。但是为了避免Facebook一直被诟病的侵犯隐私，谷歌准许用户设置权限来决定谁可以看自己发布的内容。Facebook不能有效的区分同事、同学和真正的朋友，而Google+则根据朋友圈子，将不同的人分门别类。Facebook从建立在其平台上的开发商(比如Zynga)那里提成30%，而Google+则宣布仅提成5%。在硅谷，人们曾认为谷歌已经彻底输给了Facebook，但是眼前的事实出乎所有人的意料(包括Facebook在内)。扎克伯格在哈佛的室友Joe Green是Causes(一个运行在Facebook上的应用程序)的创始人，他说，Google+的表现令人印象深刻。
Facebook在反击
现在Google+上最受欢迎的人是马克伯格，但他并没有发一个帖子，事实上他根本不愿意讨论Google+。六月的时候，他只是评论Google+在今后五年还能混得下去，言外之意是他们了抄袭Facebook。
然而在Facebook的总部，750名工程师在加班中度过了这个夏天，整个公司都处于一级戒备状态，Facebook这么多年来头一次出现这种状况。2010年夏天，当谷歌放出风来要做掉Facebook后，扎克伯格就召集他的工程师们加班加点了60天，重新完善了一些主要的功能，比如相册、圈子和最新活动等等。自那以后，Facebook的餐厅就全天开放，员工的孩子们来公司吃午饭，并在父母通宵工作前和他们拥抱互道晚安。9月，Facebook发布了许多新的功能，其中包括模仿Google+的好友分类功能。一个Facebook研发团队工程师说，谷歌可以把它全部的人力物力投入到Google+上，人们喜欢这样，我们必须重视。战斗并不仅仅在产品的开发上，今年5月，Facebook私下雇佣了著名的公关公司博雅公关在报纸和博客上泡制诋毁谷歌的文章，但是弄巧成拙，因为记者们发现了Facebook是博雅公关的客户。
Facebook为了给自己的行为辩解，指责谷歌一直侵犯用户的隐私，可是讽刺的是，这两个公司都为了广告商的利益尽可能的获取更多的私人信息。Facebook善于利用我们提供的信息，比如你在Zappos上购买了喜欢的鞋子，或者更新了状态说你正在筹备婚礼，那么就会有一堆可能喜欢的广告发给你。因此，Facebook已经成为了广告商必须抢占的阵地，尽管同谷歌相比，Facebook的广告收入要小得多，但是增长却十分迅速。根据eMarketer的预测，本年其广告收入将从去年的20亿美元扩大到43亿美元，而谷歌的广告收入仅增长30%，为380亿美元。
扎克伯格一直算计着获取更多的数据，他的方法就是让更多的人在Facebook上花费更多的时间，并同好友分享更多的东西。在9月召开的F8研发大会上，他推出了一个名为时间轴的新功能，用于取代沿用很久的个人资料页。在演示这个新功能的时候，扎克伯格将自己的信息一直更新到了1984年5月14日，也就是他出生的那天。实际上，扎克伯格就是想哄骗我们把Facebook变成数码记录簿，他希望用户上传Facebook出现之前的照片，并记录此前发生的事件，这样可以获得更多的数据。
但是在F8会议上，最引人注目的并不是这个新功能，而是Facebook和其他服务商的深度融合，比如Netflix和Spotify。现在如果想在Spotify上注册，用户首先必须拥有Facebook的账号。这样你可以在Spotify和Facebook上同时看到好友的音乐播放菜单，同时个人音乐喜好也就不再是秘密。以前很多网络发行商让用户选择是否公开他们在Facebook上的活动，但是人们通常忽略。然而在新的模式下，人们要选择是否不准许公开，这样一来Facebook就获得了更多的用户在线活动信息，并将极大的促进其广告的销售。如果说谷歌的AdWords 和AdSense是把广告提供给知道自己要什么的用户，那么Facebook的模式是给人们提供了一个发现新东西的工具。
战斗在继续
10月末的一天，一则关于社交网络的新闻在科技博客群里引起了不大不小的骚动。扎克伯格不再是Google+上关注度最高的用户，取代他的不是别人正是拉里-佩奇。尽管没啥大不了的，但是不难想象谷歌总部有人脸上正洋溢着灿烂的笑容。尽管谷歌和Facebook闭口不谈竞争对手，可是战事太胶着，即便是最小的胜利也会让其中一方欢呼雀跃。
挖对方的墙角是获取胜利最简单的方法，跳槽到对方公司工程师或者是管理人员很容易被列举。在这场人才争夺战中，Facebook取得了一边倒的胜利，看看它的员工，不论是高管还是普通的实习生，很容易找到前谷歌的员工。11个Facebook的高管中有4个是来自谷歌，包括COO谢勒尔-桑德伯格以及广告运行主管戴维-费舍尔。
但这些数字并不是这场始于2007年并且越来越激烈的战争的全部。Facebook的优势在于，它仍然是硅谷最炙手可热的公司，如果最终上市，它可以创造出更多的百万富翁；谷歌的优势是资金实力雄厚，在很多情况下，如果顶级的工程师或者高管愿意留下，那么谷歌将额外提供高达一千万美元的现金或者股票。这样很多谷歌员工就做了任何理性人都会做的事情，去Facebook获得一个offer，然后回头向谷歌要更高的报酬。一个刚刚离开谷歌的高管说，这并不是谷歌的风格，它习惯以业绩来评判一个人的价值。1月份，谷歌变化了策略，公司给所有的员工都上涨了10%的工资，将一大块奖金转化为基本工资。结果很多人的收入上涨了15%，甚至是20%。
如果说谷歌在人才战中处于守势的话，那么在吸引眼球方面则处于绝对的攻势，最大的武器就是它在互联网公司中的老大地位。比如9月份结束了为期90天得试用期后，Google+开始向所有人开放，因此引发的追捧会让任何大企业嫉妒：每天有数百万人访问Google+，谷歌的访问量瞬间飙升。除了Google.com，谷歌还要针对Gmail、Map以及YouTube用户大力促销Google+，并且植入到数百万安卓系统的手机里。推特CEO迪克-科斯特洛说，毫无疑问谷歌将吸引惊人数量的用户。
谷歌吸引用户的能力自然让Facebook忧心忡忡。尽管多年的经验让他们相信如果在公平的环境下绝对可以击败谷歌，但是Facebook担心谷歌会向微软(微博)早期那样，利用自己的地位来兜售Google+。比如在Google.com上促销即有效又没有争议，再比如利用在搜索引擎中，把Google+放在社交网络的首位。谷歌还没有对Google+使用这样的策略，但是在推广Map时用过，这让其他竞争者叫苦不迭，虽然正接受联邦政府的反垄断调查，可是不能排除谷歌故技重施。移动市场则是另一个主战场，谷歌会想出办法将Google+功能植入到安卓手机或者平板电脑中，让竞争者更加难以招架。
这方面没有难倒扎克伯格，他正在和谷歌在移动领域最大的竞争对手苹果积极沟通。根据知情人士透露，两家公司已经展开了多轮磋商，但是并没有就合作取得太多的进展。去年Facebook拒绝与苹果围绕iTunes开发的新社交网络Ping的合作，苹果很少遭到拒绝，乔布斯因此在公开场合表示了不满，因此在最新版的移动操作系统中，苹果选择了植入推特而不是Facebook。不过两家公司仍然希望可以合作，因为他们知道只有这样才能抵御共同的敌人。
我们知道你可能会想，如果是一场战争，那么谁会胜利？这个问题不好回答。谷歌进军社交网络有两个目的：第一是减缓Facebook的发展势头，第二是利用从Google+获取的数据，来提高搜索、地图以及广告业务。古多塔和佩奇都表示后一个目标更重要。古多塔说，我们可以让搜索功能更强大，让YouTube和Gmail更完善，也可以让我们的广告业务更好，但是Google+会涉及到谷歌的方方面面。
为了实现这个目标，谷歌不需要超越Facebook，只要变成社交网络界的老二就成。10月份，一个科技博客爆料，很多谷歌的高管包括执行总裁埃里克-施密特在内都没有Google+的账号。几天后，施密特的账号就悄悄的出现在了Google+上。谷歌还需要与Facebook有不同的定位，这样可以吸引用户改用Google+或者至少两个都用，现在还不清楚4000万个Google+用户有多少真正在用。当被问道为什么人们要改用Google+的时候，他们会一遍又一遍的重复，Google+的在线分享是设权限的，在不同的圈子里，Google+的用户可以和真实世界里一样放心的分享信息。
对于Facebook而言，Google+的成功意味着祖克伯格以后不能在有闪失，过去Facebook出现的错误总会被轻描淡写的一笔带过，但是现在Google+正在欢迎那些对Facebook产生不满的用户，更不用说他们的好友了。换句话说，祖克伯格必须时刻关注佩奇的一举一动，也许祖克伯格对自己用户数以及挖了谷歌很多的人过来而沾沾自喜，但是佩奇有能力扩充谷歌的队伍。最近谷歌就增加了2600个雇员，这几乎相当于Facebook员工的总和。这些新员工的任务就是，把谷歌变成社交网络的老大。
