I was reading Adotas this morning and noticed an article titled Google To Acquire Facebook? Google has been on a purchasing frenzy as of late and the acquisition of Facebook would further strengthen their arsenal. However a $900 million pending deal with MySpace (who provides Google with 11% of Google’s traffic) and a no-compete clause makes Google have to tread very gently. Google does not want to end up losing MySpace to Yahoo!
Personally, I think the purchase of Facebook would have quite a positive outlook for both Facebook and Google, here’s why:
- Facebook would receive hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in return.
- Google would get access to more personalized information from the millions of Facebook users. This would help Google in offering the most relevant search results.
- Google would gain yet another point of access to user behaviour data including upstream/downstream data at Facebook, Popularity of Groups / Locations / Users / Applications and time spent.
- Google could display contextual advertising throughout Facebook, furthermore they could offer users the ability to display AdSense on their profile/group pages allowing them to make money through Facebook.
- Facebook would receive enhanced search functionality.
- Google would have the ability to integrate many of its other services including gadgets, maps and checkout.
- If Google opened up Facebook profiles publicly (outside of the log-in), users and groups would become indexed in the organic search results. Public profiles would also allow images in Facebook to get indexed in Google’s image search. Facebook users tag their images and this would make the images very relevant to search queries
- Google could apply authority based on the amount of friends a user has or the amount of people a group contains.
- When Google purchases a company they often make many services free, as they did with FeedBurner. Perhaps with FaceBook they would offer gifts and polls (and related demographic data) for free.
- With Google’s resources and deep pockets Facebook could receive numerous enhancements.
Facebook provides an excellent service and if Google does plan on acquiring Facebook they will have to work fast because Microsoft and Yahoo! are most likely lurking very close behind.
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