Google vs Facebook vs Twitter...Winner take All?

There's a major shift taking place on the internet and the average Joe (or Joanne) has no idea what's taking place. The ironic thing is though, the shift involves the average person's most valuable online assets...their identity, personal information, habits, friends, preferences and more.

They go about their daily lives casually adding this information to their Facebook profile, tweeting it to the world on Twitter, telling everyone what they're working on via LinkedIn or sharing what's on their mind in Facebook but trust me...these companies are not taking all this personal data "casually"! This information is GOLD...gold in the hands of the company that controls the information. Why? Behavioral targeting has huge potential...with all this data, these companies can deliver extremely targeted advertising.

Another gold mine lies in the searchable data these companies are collecting. There is a ton data being collected on the servers of these companies Facebook alone estimates that users share 4 billion pieces of information a month. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. So why does this all matter? Well, these companies are now starting to allow most of this data to be searched and that means ads related to your searches can be served up just like Google AdSense/AdWords. The kicker is this, the difference between this searchable data and the searchable data Google provides is that it's coming from your network of friends and colleagues. If you want to ask what someone thought about their new iPhone, would you want to hear from some anonymous person found on Google or from one of your friends?

There's another thorn in Google's side, it's called "real-time" data. information provided on Twitter and Facebook is far more timely than what you can get on Google. Twitter is providing real-time information that is not only beating Google at it's own game but it's beating the leading news networks like CNN. The recent events in Iran allowed Twitter to shine against the news king CNN. Robert Scoble wrote a great piece on this point entitled "The Day Twitter Kicked CNN's Behind". Even Google's co-founder Larry Page admitted that Twitter has made an impact on their strategy regarding real-time search. "Larry Page: Twitter Made Google Focus On Real-Time Search".

We're starting to see Facebook Connect and Friend Connect (Google's answer to Facebook Connect) on thousands of other sites so that people can take their network of friends and personal data with them to these sites. there's a huge land grab going on here to host and control our personal user data...that's the holy grail of the new internet.

The lesson here is that the internet is is having a profound affect on the WAY we communicate, WHAT we communicate and WHO we communicate to. They've also provided a way for everything we communicate online to be stored, organized and accessed easily. It's hard to predict how all of this will affect our personal lives and businesses. As an inbound online marketing consultant I'm exposed to a lot of this on a daily basis, however, the average person is mostly unaware of what's at stake with all the personal data they casually share. It might be worth an individuals time to educate themselves a bit to what's going on and for businesses I think it's critical that they get educated on social media marketing, search engine optimization, inbound marketing strategies...the future of their business could be at stake.