Will Facebook kill the world wide web?

David Heath
Saturday, 25 June 2011 23:19

Your IT - Home IT

The jury is still out, but there are strong rumblings that social media connections are considerably more valuable and more persistent than those derived from search.  Google, are you in trouble?

The Internet was created by geeks.  No question there.

So was the World Wide Web.

And Google.

And just about every major website to have come into existence between 1990 and 2004.

In February 2004, the world changed.  The geeks lost control of the Internet (and the world wide web) although they probably didn't realise it at the time.

In fact it took another 6 years before they realised it (and that's a lot longer than it took everyone else to figure it out!).

It was in February 2004 that Facebook was launched upon an unsuspecting world (wide web) and although it was an insignificant player at the time, its growth was soon to become meteoric.

Yesterday, Ben Elowitz, Founder and CEO of Wetpaint (a new-media play) wrote an OpEd that cast a very significant new light upon the status and future direction of Facebook.  Hint: if I were Google, I'd be very, very afraid.