DISQUS

facebook is down!!!111 oh noes!

As soon as your friends can give you results in under a second, "search" is dead. Until that time arrives, don't expect too many changes in the status quo.

"Google’s alternative to Facebook’s innovate Platform was announced without so much as a hat-tip to Facebook’s ingenuity. And worse, it was drafted in ignorance of the Platform’s tried and tested design."

This is a red herring. Facebook's platform is hardly "tried and tested" and furthermore it's yet to be seen what it will look like (or if it will be successful) outside of facebook.com

I would love to see how Jimmy plans on blocking spam!

I disagree that facebook provides "laser guided marketing".
I do think that it is nice that you can provide some extra value by advertising say a new rock album to someone who has declared themselves to be a U2 fan. However, facebook still has a problem of intent. The problem is that when most people come to facebook they are there to read the feeds, catch up with people and have social interactions. When they are looking to buy something, they are usually going to a search property or something like Amazon/Ebay. It's unclear to me that facebook, by providing a search box/shopping place will be able to get people to perform this kind of context switch. I'm not saying that there won't be some overflow, just that the talk of $100bn valuations is basically masterbatory at this point.

$100bn IPO, are you serious?

Basically all the value would come from contextual search advertising presumably provided by MSFT. Let's not forget that
1) MSN search sucks
2) MSN has FAR fewer advertisers than Google/Yahoo

This means that users will probably be disatified which such a search if it launches AND that they will have a harder time monetizing each query than if they chose another partner.

It's unclear to me that MSN could change either of these factors even by 2009.