08 July 2010 | Author: J. Morton Search Copywriter

Facebook and Google set to tangle in new tech rivalry

With rumours of Google's most-recent stab at the social media market circulating last week, many have seen the move as a direct strike against Facebook - the runaway leader of the social networking pack.

However, according to a New York Times analysis of the marketplace, Facebook - which started up just over five years ago on a university campus - stands to gain more ground against its Mountain View foe than the search seraph itself.

"There is nothing more threatening to Google than a company that has 500 million subscribers and knows a lot about them and places targeted advertisements in front of them," venture capitalist Todd Dagres, an investor in Twitter, told the NYT.

"For every second that people are on Facebook and for every ad that Facebook puts in front of their face, it is one less second they are on Google and one less ad that Google puts in front of their face," Dagres said.

For its part, Google has attempted to take down the social kingpin several times in the past. However, OpenSocial - an inter-site programming coding language - faltered against the Facebook platform, especially after hackers cracked the code to snoop on users' information, and Google Buzz did not prove to be the success the search giant hoped.

Orkut - which Google touts as being more popular in growing markets such as Brazil and India - is indeed facing significant challenges from Facebook in those very countries.

However, as the Times article noted, Facebook has closed in on Orkut in India and is also rapidly bridging the numbers gap in Brazil, where its membership has increased fourfold - to eight million versus Orkut's 28 million - in the last year.

Facebook presents a particularly troubling situation for Google, as it represents a search impasse as well: profiles cannot be indexed by the Google team, and Facebook currently returns web searches with the help of upstarts Bing.

With Mark Zuckerberg recently boasting that the site would almost certainly reach one billion users - which the company seems to be backing up by setting up shop in weaker markets such as Japan - the question is less "if" than "when". But either answer might spell bad news for Google.