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Google's Trojan HorseDid the search giant just sneakily launch a Facebook killer?

By Farhad ManjooPosted Thursday, April 30, 2009, at 12:39 PM ET

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You might notice a couple of problems with this theory. First, Facebook, MySpace, and other networks can already examine your relationships—and none of them has seen anything near the financial success that social-networking evangelists have long promised. Indeed, as I argued a couple weeks ago, it's still a mystery whether sites like Facebook, which spend vast amounts on infrastructure to host all the junk you put online, will ever see huge profits. That's because advertisers are wary of running spots alongside user-generated content. So if other social sites haven't managed to turn your relationships into billions, how would Google succeed?

Because Google controls a much larger swath of the Web than its rivals. Facebook can use what it knows about your relationships to serve you targeted ads on—well, pretty much just on Facebook. That isn't much use, because people aren't very interested in commerce when they're checking in with their friends. But Google operates the Web's most far-reaching advertising network, so whatever it learns about you while you're interacting with your friends can be used to target you later on, while you're in some more ad-friendly part of the Web—when you're reading the New York Times, or watching YouTube, or searching for a Mother's Day present. By using your "social graph" as just one factor in a much larger behavioral profile, the company could finally turn social-networking into a killer business.

The possibility of Google getting into the social-networking business might sound vaguely familiar. That's because it's happened before—and it didn't work. In 2004, the company launched Orkut, a social network along the lines of Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. Orkut took off in Brazil and India, where it remains quite popular, but it fizzled in much of the rest of the world. Many of Google's other social ventures have proved similarly unspectacular. Last summer, for instance, Google launched an abysmal 3-D virtual-world called Lively; in the fall, it shuttered the project.

But to profit from your relationships, Google doesn't necessarily need to build a social network that you find fun—that is, it doesn't have to build an alternative to Facebook. Instead, all it really needs is to get you to tell it more about your connections. I'll bet that a promise of improved vanity search results will be enough to bring a lot of people on board. Indeed, even if you're not so vain, it makes good sense to set up a page on Google. A Google Profile is a good way to present your best side to potential employers, prospective dates, future in-laws, or your parole board—anyone you'd like to impress. Why wouldn't you sign up?

And you might find yourself giving Google a lot of personal info, too. In setting up my profile, I handed Google the links to my pages at Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed. By analyzing those sites—not to mention everything that it already knows about my contacts through my activity at Gmail and Google Voice—the company could probably create a startlingly precise map of my friends and family. You can think of it as a shadow social network: All of a sudden, Google has the ability to traverse my entire social circle, and I didn't even have to approve a single friend request.

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.

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