Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Will "friend-casting" be as big as search for discovering information?




















Here is a link to an interesting article that appeared recently in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Entitled "Facebook directs more online users than Google," the article cites data illustrating that Facebook sends almost as much traffic to certain websites (and more in some cases) than search engines such as Google.*

As with any research for investment purposes, the quality of the source must be considered, and it is obvious that many of those quoted in the article make their living trying to convince companies to hire their services for "social network optimization," which they believe will be as important or more important than "search engine optimization."

Even accounting for some bias, however, these issues are important ones to be aware of. In fact, we wrote about them on this blog over two years ago, in "A paradigm shift in the way you get information." This topic has enormous consequences for advertising, as George Gilder predicted over ten years ago (see the discussion in that blog post) -- in fact, it has huge consequences that stretch far beyond that area, and which may overturn many social and cultural realities that are based around the familiar advertising model that was created by the advent of radio and especially the advent of television in the 1950s.

All investors should pay close attention to this subject.

* The principals of Taylor Frigon Capital Management do not own securities issued by Google (GOOG).