2007 Half-Year Web Technology Report: A's for Google and Facebook
As it's halfway through 2007, let's take a look back on the highlights of the first half of the year. How is 2007 shaping up in terms of web technology trends and activity? Which companies have shined from January - June 2007?
Well so far in 2007, there are two Web companies that in our opinion have really stood out - Google and Facebook. Google has been furiously buying companies and refining its product range this year, while Facebook has broken through in 2007 as a BigCo and is now a true threat to other big companies like Yahoo and Fox/MySpace.
Google: The PaceSetter in 2007
Google has been on an acquisition romp
since at least October 2006, when they acquired YouTube
for $1.65B and wiki company
JotSpot at the end of that month. Since that time, Google has not only kept acquiring
companies at a rapid rate - but they've become the trailblazer for other companies to
follow. Google's $3.1B
acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick was quickly followed by similar
acquisitions from rival companies (notably Microsoft's $6B
purchase of aQuantive). Other significant acqusitions by Google this year include Feedburner,
Zenter (an
online presentations company), and just recently GrandCentral.
As well as the outright purchases of other companies, Google has continued to refine
their product line so far in 2007. They've
integrated Gmail and Docs&Spreadsheets, launched Google Apps
Premier, ramped up its
personalization efforts (
more info here), made moves
towards CPA advertising, planned Adsense for Maps,
built up its
Gadget ecosystem, and launched voice
search, Google
Gears, Street View
Maps,
Universal Search and more.
While it might be too early to declare that Google has taken over the world, it is clear from all the activities listed above that Google is well and truly setting the pace among the big Internet companies. Plus they continue to compete very well with the hundreds of alternative search engines.
By comparison, 90's Internet star Yahoo has this year gotten caught up in sticky peanut butter, missed out on buying Facebook, seen its stock price fall, and dismissed its CEO. While it's not all bad news for Yahoo, they've had a lot of challenges so far in 2007 - and with a new CEO (co-founder Jerry Yang), now is a time of re-thinking and refining for Yahoo. Also they face a new challenger in Facebook (more on that below). As for Microsoft, it has been 'steady as she goes' in Redmond - with the next generation of Windows Live launched, interesting new products like Surface, and other efforts to compete with Google and Adobe (Silverlight) in motion.
Facebook: The Rising Star of the Web
Apart from Google, the other
company to impress in the first half of 2007 has unquestionably been Facebook. They have
come into their own by doing precisely what many have called for in social networks -
open up. In Read/WriteWeb's 2007 Web
Predictions, published in December 2006, we predicted that "social networks will
probably [...] become more open - and data portability will start to occur." Facebook
first signaled moves towards this in September 2006, when they expanded registration
beyond its core user base of American college students.
But it wasn't until May 2007 that the full nature of their plans was unveiled, when Facebook announced an open platform at an event in San Francisco. Named "The Platform", it is a system enabling 3rd party companies to integrate their services inside of Facebook user pages. Almost overnight, this made Facebook much more of a threat not only to MySpace - but to Yahoo too. Also, it perhaps signaled the next Big IPO (after Google's).
Facebook has its competitors - e.g. the start pages and other social networks like LinkedIn. But there's no question Facebook has set its sights on being a big, influential Internet company. Already many startups have integrated their products into the Facebook platform, so over the rest of 2007 it'll be interesting to see how the platform continues to grow and how many more mainstream users Facebook attracts.
Conclusion
Our analysis over the past 6 months suggests that Google and Facebook have been leading the way in Web Technology, at least among the big companies. Do you agree? But also, which small web companies have caught your eye in 2007 so far?
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Nice article! One piece of confusion, maybe you can clarify - what acquisitions has Facebook made? There have been acquisitions by companies like Slide of other FB apps, but I don't know (or see in your prior article) of facebook actually buying any of the apps, or why they would.
i believe video would be the star trend in the 2nd half. watch for joost, babelgum and sites like ustream.tv - i also think this is going to be consolidated.
btw richard, you think you made a small error about facebook acquisitions. I believe they don't have funds to do that (yet) the article you linked to reports about fb apps being bought by other web companies.
Dan and heri, you are quite right - Facebook hasn't made any acquisitions. Sorry, I got that bit wrong (deleted now).
Justin.tv and it's spinoff iJustine, uStream, and Joost all have their place but when I'm being honest I tend to believe that it will be 2008 at the earliest before we see the full potential of this "lifestream" thing. There are still too many technical hurdles to work around and critical mass to achieve before the next big step in video is achieved.
Great article.
Thanks for the article.. Google has indeed become the pacer in 2007... Yahoo seems to be following behind helplessly..
Along with Facebook and Google, Yahoo has made quite a few "value" acquisitions in recent times that have relatively been under the radar of most people. Sure, the haven't spent the type of money Google is spending, but it seems they have spent less and gotten more in my opinion.
IPTV and its variants are a step in the right direction, but they're hardly unique in the sense that I can still watch TV and listen to broadcast radio. Joost, in theory, is great (although it sucks from China, VPN, TOR or not). But it's really nothing more than another distribution channel.
Facebook (and MySpace ... and possibly even LinkedIn) are baby steps toward collaboration, the "killer op" (killer opportunity) when interactions are enabled by computers. Communications is phase one; collaboration is phase two.
Search (in the broadest sense) is another issue. We've all seen the joke about Google in 1960: Submit the query and expect results in several weeks!! Let's face it, that's the way it was, and unless someone had access to Dialog, Orbit, STN, Lexis/Nexis or DowJones (or a specialty database like DTIC), that's the way it really remained until the mid-90's. Search is today's killer app AND tomorrow's "killer op." But the "op" goes much further than simple search, especially in an era when there is so much crap on the Internet. (See http://doiop.com/mindlesscrap .)
I'm going to elaborate about this in my initial post on my forthcoming Interactions 2.0 blog/e-newsletter.
BTW, under my premises, I believe that the iPhone is not such a big deal. Cool engineering, a good UI. But it's just a communications device, NOT a device for collaboration. And I doubt that it's optimized for search, either -- especially when viewing search in a broader sense.
The iPhone as a fun toy? Sure. Nothing wrong with this, although $$$ spent on an iPhone would be better spent donated to the IRC, USIP, World Vision, or some other agency working to eliminate genocide and hunger. See http://doiop.com/egoPhone .
Great article, it really summarizes what happened during this year. Take a look at "Google Gear" Beta project. I think this will change the way we are using internet today and will lead the path for the coming future. Lets wait the end of the year.