Te(ch)aos

Are Twitter and Facebook rivals to Google? Usually, we think of Google as a search company, and so we think that its main competitors have to be other search companies like Yahoo or Microsoft. But as this post from GigaOm explains, Facebook and Twitter are becoming new ways of finding information:

Google’s search engine has thrived because PageRank uses democratic algorithms that tracked page links. By contrast, real-time discovery engines like Twitter and Facebok use a more dynamic kind of democracy, linking to content that users finds worthwhile. As a result, content on the web is splitting into two basic models, and understanding this distinction makes clear why Google’s centralized role is being threatened.

Simply put, it’s the difference between discovery and search, between the “Now Web” and the “Then Web.” Here’s a more specific analogy: In college, most of us spent a lot of time in the library but also in a social hub like the campus coffee shop. One was a place for digging up information, the other a more dynamic, conversational setting, where ideas were casually exchanged. Google has been the web’s library: archival, organized and oriented around research. Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, are coffee shops: instantaneous, conversational and oriented around discovery.

What we are looking at its the natural and somewhat chaotic move toward specialization of the Web. But as the web is broken down into more and more discrete parts, every tech company is trying to get a foothold in every territory. As a result of this chaotic scramble for specialized space, it's getting harder to pin down who is operating in which industry. So many tech companies are all operating in similar spaces, all trying to push ahead of the others and dominate the Next Big Thing. Consider the following:

Google owns Orkut, which is a social network popular in other countries. Google also owns YouTube, which is a way of finding videos. And Google is obviously still the king of search. Yet as the above link shows, Facebook and Twitter contain links to plenty of videos, so those are also ways of finding videos -- just like Apple's iTunes store. And Apple still makes computers, but now it is a music store as well, as well as a smartphone company. But Apple's not into search, and they aren't into video game systems. But those are areas where Apple operating system competitor Microsoft competes. And Microsoft is again trying to compete on Google's territory with its new search engine called Bing. And Google is sort of in the operating system business, as it makes operating systems for smartphones -- but it doesn't have its own phone. Amazon, in addition to selling books and CDs and other items online, now sells Kindles, which allow you to search for books and download them. But now there's a Kindle app for your iPhone, so is Apple involved in the e-book business?

It all makes you thankful for Research in Motion, which for now seems to be sticking to making Blackberries, but could become a search/social networking/laptop making e-book company any day now.

In this environment, it seems like competitors can come from anywhere. In fact, as more and more aspects of society become digitized, tech companies will be moving into more and more areas of the economy. The basic capability that all of these companies have is the ability to organize and broadcast digital content. As time goes on, I assume all of these niches will be filled with certain obvious leaders, and companies may learn certain areas that they have real advantages and certain areas where they should give up. Until then, for many aspects of technology, it's anyone's game and everyone's game.