Great piece on Epicenter explaining, plausibly, how Facebook could grab Google's ad business by using data they gather better than Google does. Further, even though Google does accumulate some of this data, they can't use because they've promised not to.

I doubt a few years ago if Google thought this kind of route-around was possible.

The same thing happens on the journalism side of things as well. A few years ago CNET probably felt they could not be routed-around, but they were. It happens regularly, and will certainly happen again.

I have a theory that you can avoid being routed around if you don't try to erect the barriers at all. If you welcome all comers, and try to learn from them, including your competitors. In such a world, Google would have tried to do what Facebook and Twitter do as soon as they came around, without trying to use their installed base advantage to compete. I don't think that organizationally they could use their own people to do it, rather they would invest in the newcomers, aggressively.

One tech company that appears to get this is also a generally quiet company that doesn't bluster much, and tries like hell not to take sides in the technology wars. For 10 points, which company is that? Click on the plus next to this paragraph in the blog post for the answer.

 11/14/2010; 4:41:06 PM.   .

Fred Wilson has a post today about the explosion of platforms that developers may choose to support.

It's a race to see which one gets the killer app, the one everyone has to have, and then the other platforms will drop off, and there will be a consensus platform, the one "everyone" develops for. I hope, for the sake of all of us, that it's a platform without a platform vendor -- that no one gets to decide who has access to the market and who doesn't. Of course if that ever comes about, and the vendor throws around their weight too much, that's when the DoJ steps in, assuming the superrich haven't completely bought the government by then.

Anyway, it seems to usually happen that way. There were lots of personal computers until Visicalc came along, then the consensus was the Apple II. Until the IBM PC came along and everyone wanted to run Lotus. Then Windows and Excel, and the web and Yahoo, Amazon, Google, etc.

 11/14/2010; 3:34:55 PM.   .

Andrew Keen tweets: "While Facebook wants all of us to publicize our personal data, its strategy is to privatize its data from Google."

To which I responded: "Welcome to the tech industry! Welcome to your hamster cage!"

This isn't the first time I've written about hamster cages, but I haven't explained what I meant.

They make a wide variety of colorful and fun cages for hamsters that are designed to keep the hamster, and their human owners, entertained for hours. When you get tired of one, you can buy another. It looks great until you realize one day, that you can't get out! That's the whole point of a cage.

Remember how they used to say: "If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is?" They still say it.

Another one: "There's no such thing as a free lunch." Exactly.

When they say you get to use their social network for free, look for the hidden price. It's there. They're listening and watching. It's pretty and colorful and endlessly fun for you and your human owner.

 11/14/2010; 3:22:56 AM.   .