Google and Facebook: More similar than you might think

Google and Facebook are physically located fairly close to each other, in Mountain View and Palo Alto, California respectively, but they do very different things: Google is primarily a search engine, and Facebook is a social networking site. Dig beneath the surface, however, and you'll find that the two companies are actually very similar: Both of them sell your personal information in order to make money.

Google uses your search queries to feed you targeted advertising. If you use Gmail, Google displays ads based on the subject and contents of your emails. It targets ads to you on YouTube based on what you watch. If you use a Google location service, such as Google Maps, it points you to advertisers in your area. Google claims that it doesn't warehouse or mine the information that you give it, but it sucks up enormous amounts of data, and it's nonsensical to believe that Google isn't correlating that information.

Facebook, on the other hand, gets you to give it as much personal information as it can so that it can send you targeted advertising. The company also sells your information to its partners so that they can send you advertising and target their sales messages to you. Facebook correlates the information that users provide with that of their friends to build a comprehensive demographic and psychographic profile of each user. Most of Facebook's "initiatives" over the years have been attempts to convince its users to give it more of their personal information, changes in policies to make more of that information public, or programs for monetizing that information.

Whenever either company introduces a new product or service, it's important to ask: How it will generate more salable information or offer more opportunities to monetize that information? At their core, that's what Google and Facebook are all about.

Here comes the G1

Yesterday, T-Mobile and Google launched the G1, previously known as the HTC Dream, the first Android-compatible mobile phone. Comparisons with the 3G iPhone were immediate and obvious; the G1 is about the same height and width as the iPhone, but it's about twice as thick. It will sell for a little less, $179 vs. $199 for the 3G iPhone, and like the iPhone is available only on a two-year plan. The G1 has several more buttons than the iPhone, the most important of which are part of a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, which, of course, the iPhone doesn't have.

As you'd expect, the G1 is very Google-centric; you have to have a Gmail account in order to use the phone, and all the other Google services are front-and-center. It has a lot of location-centric, GPS-based features--even more than the iPhone, and unlike the iPhone, turn-by-turn navigation applications will be possible. And, developers can add applications to the G1 without review or approval by Google or T-Mobile, so it's a far more open platform than the iPhone.

There is a "but", however, and as this video from Engadget shows, in this case the "but" is that the iPhone is just much better integrated, and operates much more smoothly, than the G1. However, that's to be expected, since Google's Android is designed to operate on a wide variety of devices, some of which Google will have very little control over, while the iPhone and the version of OS X that the iPhone runs are engineered together. Android is a "generalist" system, while the iPhone is very tightly integrated.

I'll withhold my final verdict until I can play with the G1 myself, but from everything I've seen, it's not as refined as either the iPhone or the most recent BlackBerry models, but nevertheless, it's a very good first effort.