Google overtaken by Facebook? Not really.

It’s all over the news that Facebook has overtaken Google in terms of traffic in the USA.

But make no mistake, Google has not been overtaken by Facebook. Facebook is a long way off Google as far as commercial success is concerned. The importance difference, which isn’t about to change anytime soon is this:

People do business with Google.

People socialize on Facebook.

And just like any party, they tend to fizzle out. This seemingly small difference has a dramatic impact on their futures. My analogy is that of a fun park versus CBD. Facebook is being touted as the final platform, the social network to beat all social networks. And yes, it still has some laughable valuations ($100 billion) .

The reality is that numbers can be very deceiving, and when looked at arbitrarily like this, and I’m still certain the value of each Facebook visitor is marginal compared to that of Google. The question I asked myself is this: Could I live without Facebook? Yes. Could I live without Google? No. I’m not about to predict the future, but I want to leave startup blog readers with a reminder that statistics only have value when they are placed in context.

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