The one little thought I would add to that is that when Google first started working on a self driving car everyone went "WTF is a search company doing..". Now, X years later... it's a different story. People have started to really think about self-driving vehicles and autonomous travel. I don't see Glass at this point... but I didn't see practical self driving cars 6 years ago either, let alone states licensing them.

Google isn't a search company, it's an AI/ML company.

It certainly seems to be the focus of their long term R&D spending. The ML part, of course, has always been a central part of their business due to its importance for search and ad targeting.

Google is currently an Ad company that drives you to those ads using AI/ML.

And someday soon they may literally drive you to their advertisers using AI/ML ...

Cable box popups in the near future: "Press OK on your remote to go to Pizza Hut."

You'll give your car the order on the way, and it'll contact the local Pizza Hut's system to place it.

And 3M was once a sandpaper company, who expanded "applying coatings to backings" into quite a few things.

Very true, but when they started working on a driver-less car in 2006, they were still thought of as a search company. They hadn't yet bought Youtube or DoubleClick.

Google isn't an AI/ML company, it's an ad platform company.

But Google didn't start life that way - they were born a search company. That's what I find so interesting about Facebook at present, here they are, investment in hand and a world of opportunity. From here on in they can choose their own path and focus on whatever they like - just as Google have had the opportunity to do.

Google itself didn't help, so could you? What is AI/ML? I suppose the AI part is artificial intelligence?

I think you're right for AI, and I'd gander Machine Learning for the other.

Author here: I'm with you. The steady success of the self-driving cars has made me take some of these other projects much, much more seriously.

Maybe it's simply the Thrun factor?

> Maybe it's simply the Thrun factor?

That man's track record of amazing projects is really jaw dropping. Self driving cars, udacity and glass? I want a planet with more people like that in it.

We have one. Sadly half of them are working at Facebook trying to figure out how to make people click on more ads. The other half are working in the non research part of google trying to figure out how to make people click on more ads.

You forgot Goldman Sachs.

It's because they have to eat.

Exciting stuff. Sebastian might be staying up late working on the 'Milk and Cookies' humanoid android release.

Oh, I'm willing to be surprised. And I'm willing to give Google a lot more benefit of the doubt than I am most entities at being able to execute on this stuff. But still... Glass? Seriously?

Why seriously? Why build a web browser? If Chrome is to make the web a better platform for serving ads, then Glass is to make you a better platform for receiving ads. And in the process, they trade you some utility for being a marketing sponge.

And also push computer vision and pervasive HCI further forward. Sort of a weird deal, but overall... not wholly awful. Those patents will expire eventually!

Agreed as it sits now... but maybe the current form factor is the limit of today's technology. And maybe the insights they get from even attempting to develop that kind of interface puts them 5 years ahead when someone invents a holographic projector that clips onto your shirt collar. But if you don't even try it, then you don't even get the "maybe".

We don't have the technology to make volumetric holograms, the closest thing is some persistence of vision-like system made by a Japanese company that's very low-res and can make you blind if you stand too close to it.

How many google ads do you see on your phone? How many google ads would you see if they were in your HUD glasses?

>Google tries stuff, fails a lot, and stumbles on as many successes as they engineer.

True, but worth pointing out that often the best way to succeed, especially on anything truly innovative, is to be ready to try stuff and fail a lot.

Connecting people and giving them a new way to communicate with each other is a big waste to society? Facebook has fundamentally changed the idea of the weak tie for many people. If that's a waste, then I don't really know what else is meaningful in life.

To be clear: I didn't say that Facebook was a waste. I said that Facebook's engineering effort was wasted, relative to the societal benefit (pick your definition) we see from the equivalent people at Google. And by extension, I made the point that Facebook hiring all these people was a net loss to society, because it didn't do anything but make an already good product a little better.

One could argue that Facebook's hiring spree enabled them to scale and further handle large amounts of users and photos.

Is this a total waste to society? Could the Arab spring have happened without such social tools? Is the world a better place when common people are empowered to fight against perceived repression?

I'm not taking a stance on those revolutions will affect their countries. I will say, however, that a government that can protect itself against revolt has little incentive to look out for its people. Society can be made 'better' in many ways.

One could argue, yes. But not, IMHO, well. Again: other companies have done much more with their employee talent. To argue otherwise seems like mostly excuse-making to me. Facebook has taken a bunch of great hackers and exploited them very poorly.

> If that's a waste, then I don't really know what else is meaningful in life.

The "strong tie"? I'm just not so sure changing the "weak tie" is such a net positive for society. I'm not going to claim that FB doesn't have its positives but I'd rather see a society building strong ties with fewer people than weak ties with many. (and, frankly, doing nothing but wasting time for hours per day)

Fewer, stronger ties sounds like a recipe for insulation and groupthink, just as weaker more numerous ties sounds like a recipe for banality and conformity.

I prefer society, via technology, to continue to have and explore both.

How is communicating with people on Facebook a greater waste of times than playing games, being on here, chatting with friends, watching movies etc.

It's funny because your entire comment is self contradictory. On one hand you criticise socialising using Facebook and on the other want to build stronger ties. Socialising = Stronger ties.

I explicitly stated that FB has its positives. But wasting hours doing anything is bad. FB stalking people != stronger ties. It's a problem many people face, along with excessive gaming, etc.

I criticize the assertion that changing weak ties, in the way FB does, is a net positive for society. It's one thing to reconnect with an old friend, it's another to spend time everyday browsing through pictures of people you haven't seen in 10 years. Too much of the latter happens on FB.

Socialising does not equal stronger ties. Talking to a bunch of people at a party is not going to create anything but acquaintances, a word we use to describe people you have met but who mean close to nothing to nothing to you and vice versa. Socialising on facebook is even weaker than that.

Sometimes those weak ties are weak for a reason.

For a long time we heard the same thing about Google - they have a search engine that makes a lot of money with PPC ads, but what else?

Facebook's time will come. The IPO money could make that happen sooner rather than later (if they don't blow it buying mobile apps.)

I think the difference could be that Google is headed up by researchers, and thus the interest and fascination in pushing boundaries with research. While Zuckerberg is a visionary, I'm not sure the same type of commitment to research that is not immediately useful will ever happen within Facebook's walls.

Being able to connect with people from around the world and share content is not a big waste to society.

But they were connecting people years ago. Facebook, from the perspective of their core features, has gotten only incrementally better over the last 5-6 years. And in doing so they've sucked up a huge chunk of talent.

Google over the same period has produced a huge amount of stuff, some of it (gmail, android) wildly successful. Hell, Google has even cloned facebook itself (and from a technical perspective, arguably, done it better) in that time period. And they've done it with what seems to be a very comparable talent pool. So from that perspective, yes, Facebook's engineering employees are wasted.

The biggest technical achievement of Facebook has been scaling Facebook. They've solved a lot of difficult technical problems to do so. And News Feed, Connect, and Open Graph are all huge steps forward in Facebook's ambition, although the third-party ecosystem still leaves something to be desired. Thank god that Facebook killed Evite, but now I'm hoping for someone/something to kill Washington Post Social Reader.

But again, Google did all that stuff too (almost 1:1, even -- remember that G+ is a facebook clone). And somehow they also found time to make self driving cars, a first tier mobile operating system, ChromsOS, a Dropbox clone, these ridiculous glasses, etc...

Facebook just looks pretty lame in comparison, sorry.

> Google did all that stuff too (almost 1:1, even -- remember that G+ is a facebook clone

That misses qq66's point; G+ isn't a 1:1 clone exactly because it doesn't do anything like a quarter billion photos per day.

I'm not doubting G's potential to handle Facebook scale, but they're very far away from it right now.

Youtube handles 3.7x10⁹ frames per day (assuming 12 fps video, which is a low estimate). That's 3.7 billion frames that have to be converted and checked against an enourmous database of copyrighted content.

You're right that G+ doesn't, but FB doesn't have anything on Google on scaling.

What about Youtube? Picassa? Indexing the whole internet? That is some amazing scale.

I would say the scales youtube and google search operate at show that they could easily handle google+ at facebook's scale.

You do realize that Google has 10 times the employees, revenues, profits, etc. of Facebook?

Of course. But it's a culture thing. Google was producing great innovative madness when they were 1/10th its size size. And Facebook had what is essentially their core service already in place when they were 1/10th their current size. They've since done very little that's interesting. I don't see why that's controversial, nor why so many people feel the need to "defend" them.

The only thing that Google didn't fail with was search. Stop pretending there is anything else they've made which can't be labeled as mediocre copy at best.

Please. Maps, Chrome and Gmail alone make what you said an absurdist lie. (I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and put AdSense/AdWords under "search" instead of calling them a separate product.)

Youtube and Blogger were acquisitions, but have done, y'know, pretty well under Google's roof. Android seems to be kinda successful for something that's a "mediocre copy at best".

And those are just the big products. They've had a ton of little successes too, like Earth, Docs, Sketchup, Voice...

And they've had a lot of products that look like clones (Drive, Groups). And they've had a lot of bona fide failures too.

But the point is that Google produces stuff. Facebook kinda doesn't. They improve their existing product and add features to it. Maybe that will change (c.f. Instagram), or maybe it won't. But right now I don't think you can say that Facebook has a culture of innovation in the same way that Google (or Apple, or hell, even Microsoft -- companies that ship new products regularly) does.

I am not a fan of Facebook so don't label me as such.

Google is known for its spectacular flops. The fact that they've used their cash to buy already successful services doesn't make them creative.

I view google as completely unimaginative company. Their search was nice once but right now their search results look like christmas tree so I can't admire them for that either.

Basically, google sucks.

Don't forget Google Docs, Maps, StreetView, Gmail...

What I find interesting about Facebook is that it allowed people from the current (and previous) generations to re-connect with people they'd lost touch with since previously there had been no tool designed to easily facilitate reconnecting. Future generations may find they they won't lose those connections since the tools will be in place allowing them to remain in touch as much or as little as they choose. Will they still have the same motivation to re-connect at some point in their lives if that opportunity has always been available to them? There's a very large percentage of Facebook users whose "friends" are really just people they knew back in high school that they connected with on Facebook out of curiosity. It'll be interesting to see if that dynamic continues for future generations.

> Being able to connect with people from around the world and share content is not a big waste to society.

That's correct. However, the ability to "connect with people from around the world and share content" is, as your parent post notes, is Facebook's "core" functionality. What does Facebook have to show for the engineers they've hired this year, engineers they've hired last year? Are read receipts on Facebook chat more beneficial to "society" than other endeavors the engineers could be working on instead?

Do you really think it's appropriate to compare a 2-days-to-make chat feature with self-driving vehicles and clothes with computers in them?

When Google changes its icons for special occasions is that more beneficial to "society" than other things they could be working. Is ANYTHING people do really the best they could do for society.

I just don't understand why you are holding Facebook to some arbitrary standard.

Actually, Google Doodles educate the society at large about people that made a difference in this world. So yes, work on Google Doodles is beneficial to society.

It is if that service is designed to A) Collect data about the society as a whole in order to B) sell them shit and C) spy on them.