Place and Time

After Facebook announced its plans to use its social graph to become the mayor of Location (via Places API, deals) and also become the ubiquitous sign in on the mobile platform, Mahendra, Arjun Ram and I had an interesting discussion on Twitter. It started because Arjun and I were wondering when Facebook Places would come to India, but also moved on to the impact of these announcements on Foursquare and even Google.

Now in terms of world domination plans, Google is hardly a sitting duck and has been trying to gain a foothold in ‘social’ for a while now, with little success to report so far. But Android has been making huge strides and that should be some consolation. In our twitter discussion, I mentioned that what Facebook had done with this horizontal approach to the mobile platform (OS/hardware independent and just dependent on you being online) is a parallel to what Google did with Android, except this is a way more compelling move.

Towards the end of our chat, I wondered whether, a couple of years later, we’ll be speaking the same way about Facebook as we are about Google now. Its difficult to imagine how, especially when Facebook’s strategy is about adding a social element to every online activity. Like I said, i have no clue on what the frontier might be, but then again, at one point, I did think, perhaps naively that Google had world domination all sorted out.  That was until Facebook started its march.

Sometime back I’d written about whether every era has an organisation which best captures the culture that would enable success in the era. The time between eras is fast shrinking – IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook (?) (no, i haven’t forgotten Apple, just ignoring it) and I eagerly await the next breakout star. But I’m also trying to see if there’s something that connects the dominant forces – something that is not unique and not dependent on the time they were the gold standard in.

Two posts I read recently gave me some understanding of why Facebook seems to be advancing faster. “Google’s real problem – GTD?” (Getting Things Done) at GigaOm and “Facebook and Google” at Piaw’s blog. Both pointed to cultural differences and the way the organisations deal with human resources. And so I wonder, is it inevitable that culture changes with scale, and how much can it change before things go downhill? Is there a way to stem that ‘rot’? I read a post about Amazon recently, that shows how Amazon deals with the various companies it acquires. More on ‘culture’ next week.

until next time, search..social..surprise 🙂