The Battle of the "Time Sinkable" Sites

Social Media has definitely taken its place in today's society.  As we learned in week 1, there are many different areas that make up the "landscape" of social media.  Social networks, such as Facebook, are dominant amongst web users today and most relevant amongst our current culture.  In fact, Facebook is not only the top social network site, it recently surpassed Google as the winning site based on the amount of time spent on all over sites. In addition, Facebook announced it had over 500 million users in July and plans to double that number by reaching out to countries such as China and Germany who have not yet become part of the Facebook world. With Facebook users spending so much time on its site, this has Google extremely concerned.

What can Google do to compete with Facebook and capture more time from its users?  Does it build a social networking site similar to Facebook?  What sort of innovation should the company focus on?  Will this innovation parallel with Google's mission statement to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful? All of these questions pop in my mind and are obviously very tough questions not only for me, but for these companies.  

As we learned in week 1, social media has evolved throughout time to be what it is today. It didn't just happen one morning. I think Google and Facebook's next steps will not only affect the evolution of social media, but change the way we use internet marketing.  As internet marketers, I believe we must stay on top of the top site's innovations and goals to be able to effectively market to our customers.  It will be interesting to follow these social media companies while taking this Internet Marketing class.  Maybe by then, I will have answers to all of my questions.

You can find the Facebook/ Google article on CNN at http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/09/10/facebook.google.time/index.html