Facebook Should Be Fighting FourSquare, not Google

I don't like "Liking" websites. Comments all over the web are ok, at best. While the internet as it exists today is definitely interesting, and owning search is a cool theory (works nicely for Google), it seems like, by trying to take on Google, Facebook is engaging in a battle it can easily lose and might not be worth fighting in the first place. As Facebook gets further away from its core "cool" factor, mobile players like FourSquare and Gowalla are gaining a foothold, creating their own social graphs, and usurping Facebook's ability to do something really really huge. Facebook is perfectly positioned to lead the jump from desk to mobile, and I think the company should rededicate itself to that pursuit instead of fighting Google.



It starts with this - I don’t care, nor does anyone with whom I’ve spoken, about how many of my friends “Like” some webpage. Why? Because, what does “liking” something really mean? Does it mean that the information was useful, that the person likes the way the webpage is laid out, or something else entirely? Also, what do I care if one of my 1,000 “friends” who I met Sophomore year of college and had a drunken exchange about the foibles of referee calls in basketball likes an article on CNN about Obama’s tax plan? Let’s not even get into the part of this that talks about how, usually, I’d be the “first of my friends to like this”, making it even more useless. So, unless I’m missing something (like the fact that Microsoft, the perennial internet dunce, owns a chunk of Facebook and still has a huge grudge against Google), social search a la Google/Bing seems meh, and I wouldn’t bank my future on its success.

Here’s what is cool – knowing that one of my 1,000 “friends” with whom I’ve had a drunken exchange about the foibles of referee calls in basketball is getting drunk at a bar nearby and watching the Warriors putting a pounding on the Knicks (obviously, this is a pipe dream). It’d be even cooler if that bar was offering me a deal on wings and beers so that I would watch basketball there as opposed to the lame-ish fusion place I’m at right now. It’d be 3x cooler if I could have a 1-step process to shoot that friend a message immediately after seeing he’s there, asking him “Yo man, is it cool over there? I’m like a block away. Let’s see if Donaghy blows another one!”, and if maybe that could be sent as a text so it’ll pop up instead of being confined to Facebook. There are many more cool things Facebook could do here because it knows everyone with whom I would think to hang out, and it probably knows why we’d want to hang out. Making it even more of a no-brainer is that Facebook can capitalize on this whole one-identity thing they love – I don’t have to enter my info into FourSquare or Gowalla. I can just click on my Facebook App, which comes standard with my iPhone, and BOOM!

The only thing they have remaining to do here is hustle the hell out of it. The profit potential is huge (ads, rev shares, selling add-on useful things like bus passes, deals, etc). Otherwise, tons of smart people wouldn’t have put money into FourSquare. This profit potential should also be a big deal to Facebook given their awful clickthrough rates that advertisers will inevitably complain about and their 35x revenue valuation that they likely want to try and live up to.

So, Facebook employees, here’s the actionable advice: put some of your tech guys in NYC so they can be amidst the social/mobile revolution, poach some Foursquare employees instead of Google employees, get some serious hustlers – those super nodes on the social graph you know so much about, do some proper and authentic seeming celebrity uses – like a “Jersey Shore bar crawl/party bus”, and make moves that matter. Ultimately, get people using “Places” because, if you don’t, you’re going to be left behind on mobile, and you’ll end up like that one investor you guys have.