Kieran Senior

• Published:May 9th, 2008
• Comments:No Comment
• Category:Pages

Here’s an interesting read for the day. The BBC have looked into staff moving from Google to Facebook, and there seem to be a great number of them who are doing so. The article moves on to saying things like “the Google of yesterday” without any clear notion of why. Because employees are shifting from Google to Facebook? Let’s get something straight here. What on earth is similar between the two? They may both be working with the web, but their areas are in almost opposite directions. Social networking versus a large scale search giant providing a multitude of AJAX-enabled web tools to perform desktop-esque tasks. Perhaps it’s just me, but I can’t see how the two can be compared, the fact is that there’s still a big load of brains out there in the world that Google could quite easily snatch up.

In spite of all this, there’s still some observations I would like to make:

• Facebook have acquired Google staff, in what ways will this benefit social networking?
• How would Facebook possibly take over services that Google provide?
• If Facebook do compete with Google, surely they will lose the entire point of Facebook and start fanning out to areas they’re really not meant to?

It annoys me when I hear crappy news articles like this trying to compare apples and oranges. What they don’t realise is that staff shift from big company to big company all the time, just because it’s happening to the “hot” stuff at the moment, doesn’t mean it’s not happening elsewhere. When I worked in the industry I personally met some of the big shifters and whilst it was talked about a significant amount, it wasn’t something the press would get hold of, and it wasn’t something the press would have been interested in.

Anyone who thinks Facebook is domineering companies like Google because of their staff acquisition is quite simply misguided.