Who Will Rule the New Internet?

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Google Tries to Connect
The first phase of the web's growth was all about putting information online and giving people a way to find and connect to it. The second and current phase is all about connecting people to one another.

"Social is the new black," says Joe Kraus, who oversees Google's efforts to build out a social layer that runs across the entire Web. In this, as in all things that Google does, Kraus' strategy has been to create an alliance of social networks that will use open standards rather than Facebook's proprietary network and coding language, so that developers can spread their applications.

"Google has relied on an open Internet to make its entire business," he tells me. "It has a genetic predisposition for openness." That's partly because Google's core business, search, depends on openness. Google can't find the things you want on the Web — documents, music, images and so on—unless they are open and accessible, Kraus says. The richest Internet company on the Fortune 500 (it's ranked 150, with $16.5 billion in revenue), Google has a business plan that depends on the Web being used by as many people as possible. That's why the company spends so much time and energy building new applications that make the Web more useful or fun.

Social networks are a threat to that business; users tend to stay within their network and communicate among themselves or simply fool around with apps. When Facebook's users are playing Scrabulous or tagging photos, for example, they're not using Google. Indeed, they're more likely to discover new things via friends or in-network applications such as iLike, a service that matches your friends' musical tastes to your own.

So Google retaliated last November with OpenSocial, an alliance of Facebook's competitors — MySpace, hi5 and Google's own social network, Orkut, among others — to try to create a write-once, run-anywhere application platform. That means a developer, with only modest tweaking, can build an application that runs across all the major social networks except, of course, Facebook. "When you talk to developers, most of them don't have 50 people; they can't write their applications 50 different ways," Kraus says. "They really want to write their application once and get as much distribution as possible."

He definitely has a point. But I wonder if Google is too late — and old — for the social-networking party. "Google recognizes it needs to become more people-oriented, but it needs to add that to its existing platform. It's not at all native," says my neighbor, Seth Goldstein, who runs SocialMedia, an advertising network for social networks. "Facebook was designed from the ground up to render these complex and nuanced social relationships."

Why the iPhone Matters
Apple's calculus is much simpler: it doesn't matter who prevails online — Facebook, Google, both or someone else. Steve Jobs simply wants to ensure that you use his devices to get there.

To that end, the new iPhone, which is expected to be announced on June 9, is "hugely significant," says Andreessen, who now presides over a company, Ning, that allows anyone to build his or her own social network. "The iPhone, a lot of people around here believe — and I think this is true — is the first real, fully formed computer that you can put in your hand," he says. "It has all the requirements it needs to be a viable platform."