Because social is/was such a fundamental aspect of the human experience. As proven by facebook’s continued explosive growth in the years since Google tried to compete. Not to mention FB’s ability to affect markets, attitudes, and politics at global scale.

It would have been better if they had competitors to keep them honest.

Disagree strongly. Lots of categories are a fundamental part of the human experience. No one company can or should try and compete in all of them.

I really admire Apple here a lot more than Google. They seem to have a stronger sense of who they are and who they are not.

Sure. But I never said Google should try to compete in all of them. Just social, given that it is up there as a fundamental human need, hardwired into our brains like the need for food or sex. Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful.” You really can’t fault them for trying to organize the world’s social information when it became clear to everyone that social was powerful enough to become one of the dominant computing paradigms.

My take is, they were justified in going for it, but it’s simply not in their DNA. Social information is different from the non-human information where Google dominates (eg search, maps, etc).

I do share your admiration for Apple vs Google. But I wonder how long they will be able to keep it up without a Jobsian product visionary to define their identity. Tim Cook is doing a good job so far but there is only so long they can coast on iPhone dominance and strong operations. Apple’s identity revolves around defining the future, and I’m not sure they still have that ability.

Whether or not they should have, I applaud Google for at least trying. Facebook needs a real competitor.

This was, in fact, the dominant narrative at the time. Niche search products like Amazon (products), Facebook (social), and Twitter (news) were going to be the end of Google if they didn't get their act together. It's the same reason they're so obsessed with becoming the destination or broker (ads) for search queries instead of sending people on to organic results.

Facebook is the only other company that has meaningful market share in online ads - the stats are always something like "Google + Facebook have 90-something %". Had Google managed to build a product that replaced Facebook, maybe they'd have that 90+% to themselves.

All large enough corporations expand until they can read email; those that don't are subsumed by ad-hoc implementations of 50% of Common Lisp. - Paul McCarthy (1956)

Facebook is perhaps the biggest competitor to YouTube with video.

can't search a closed Facebook network. Facebook sucked up the internet.