For the week ending March 13, 2010, and for the first time in its spectacular ascendancy, Facebook became the most visited site on the Internet. Already, analysts and experts are hailing this as a momentous event, one that validates the power of social networking in the rapidly evolving universe of the World Wide Web. There’s just one problem: the premise is simply false.

Dusting off the history of the recent past, almost exactly two-and-a-half-years ago, Google passed MySpace to become the most visited site on the Internet – and has held that position until last week. Yes, that’s right: MySpace, the once-meteoric and now-languishing social network that went from Internet sensation to, in the eyes of marketers, the social network for less affluent and educated demographics, fairly recently held the lofty moniker “most visited site.” So this symbolic achievement of Facebook harkens less to any real milestone moment in the history of social networking on the Internet, and more to the hyperbolic crowning of a flavor of the month.

By Juhan Sonin (@jsonin) and Dirk Knemeyer (@dknemeyer)

At the dawn of this new decade, Google sits comfortably atop the computing industry (see Part 1 and Part 2 of this series for my take on how they got there). Dominant in search – still the killer app of the Internet, with all due respect to social networking – Google has a variety of other essential and emerging products that put them at the very pinnacle of software. Still not satisfied, Google has officially moved into the deep end of the pool with their recent consumer hardware products and are clearly positioning themselves for a three team race between themselves, Microsoft, and Apple for leadership in the broader and more emerging category of digital lifestyle experiences.

Where does Google go from here? Unlike Apple and Microsoft, whose apexes are almost certainly in the past, Google’s peak has yet to come. While they may still face as many failures as they do successes – can they truly become the dominant player in mobile computing hardware? Highly unlikely! – they are well-positioned to be the industry’s sacred cow in the decade ahead. This may be traced to a number of reasons that speak to the very heart of why businesses succeed and fail:

1. Brand. Apple may still reek cool, but the cold, hard truth is Steve Jobs is getting older and so is Apple’s core group of brand passionates. In fact, the other night I was watching a television program on the most loyal Apple devotees. It was hardly a glamorous collection. Now in their 50’s or older, most of them reflected an out-of-time-and-place hippie fanaticism. Relics of another age, they represent the backbone of people who lifted Apple to glorious heights in the 1980s and kept the fires burning during the lean 1990s.On the other hand, Google’s core fan base is made up of people who came of age during the Internet Era. They can’t imagine a world without easy and frequent Internet access and see mobile computing devices as logical, even natural, manifestations of modern technology. While Apple’s wonderful products of the last decade have brought countless new fanatics into their brand umbrella, the company still carries the leg iron of the multi-coloured Apple logo and the zeitgeist of the parents and grandparents of tomorrow’s consumers. People want to see themselves reflected in the companies, products, and services they choose. For the young, for the people who see now and tomorrow as “their time,” Google, not Apple (and certainly not Microsoft!) is the sexy choice.
2. Product. Google is the Internet; the Internet is Google. Beneath the many devices that rule our lives is the software that collectively comprises the Internet. Thanks to it’s dominance in search – which is how most people decide what is important to them – Google is the primary driver of that software. To be clear, search will become less and less important as the other software gets smarter. In fact one could argue that the peak of search has already passed. Yet in the process of dominating search Google has smartly embedded themselves into what seems like every possible nook and cranny of Internet services. There would be an Internet without Google, but can any of us really imagine what that Internet would be?We would search from monolithic web portals. “Web mail” as an email platform would follow an archaic page refresh model – notice that Microsoft and Yahoo to name two still haven’t gotten it right! There would not be a large and meaningful company attempting to literally redefine what a computing operating system in the Internet age should be. There would not be viable, free, online alternatives to simple business productivity software such as Microsoft Office. In these and dozens of other cases, Google has pushed the standards and even limits of what can and should be done by, with, and for the Internet. In the process it has woven itself into the fabric of the very Internet and become the one company that, just maybe, the Internet literally cannot do without.

Over the last few years the Internet has become an integral part of the lives of a majority of people in the United States. Important to that sentence is integral: while the Internet became a central engine to business well over a decade ago, for huge groups of people - children and adolescents, retirees, houseparents - it is only through the rise of mainstream social networking that we have truly become what could be termed a full-time computing nation.

With apologies to Apple and Microsoft, Google is the most important company in computing. Their rise over the past decade has been meteoric: from a struggling start-up operating out of a small office in downtown Palo Alto, California to today representing the present and future of computing. To call this ascension improbable is a gross understatement. After all, this is a company Yahoo! declined to purchase for a song, yet today could buy and sell Yahoo! many times over without breaking a sweat. It begs the question: how did it happen?

For Immediate Release

ARLINGTON, MA (U.S.) - February 7, 2010 - McAfee, Inc., the world's largest dedicated security technology company released their 2010 suite of consumer products today, designed from the ground-up by Involution Studios. PC Magazine is already enthusing over the new user interface, calling it "user-friendly," "pleasant," and "streamlined," giving it a 4 star rating and "within shouting distance" of their coveted Editor's Choice Award. This is an increase from the 2 1/2 star rating given to the previous version.

Tomorrow is the expected announcement of the new Apple “tablet” computer. Predictions for this device are all over the map, ranging from a “true” tablet computer, down to an oversized iPhone, and everything in between. I don’t have any inside information about Apple, but I think I have a pretty good idea what this new device is going to be. And if I’m wrong, Apple may just be releasing their first major lemon in a really long time.

I expect the new Apple device to be a “Kindle killer:” a device that leverages the iPhone OS in a larger and more versatile interface that is optimized for buying, transferring and consuming content. I hardly think it will limit itself to simply books or magazines; I expect this to be a next-generation media consumption device, to beautifully handle video and to incorporate gaming at least inasmuch as the iPhone does currently and quite likely even more.

This is part one of a three-part series that will detail Google’s rise to becoming the dominant company in the computing industry. Part one will review the history of IBM and Microsoft, Google’s predecessors in this position; part two will take a close look at the last decade in computing and particularly at Google’s; and part three will look into the future and help you understand what’s to come for Google and the rest of the industry.

Depending on which gushing analyst you listen to, Google’s release last week of the Nexus One “superphone” is going to change the computing industry. Some are pointing to the phone itself and the fact that Google is now officially a hardware company. Others are pointing to the Google ecommerce store and approach to selling the phone and calling that the true harbinger of future dominance. Wrapped up in much of this excitement is a sense of surprise, as if Google’s doing these things wasn’t something that—at the very least—should be seen as a predictable result of Google’s expanded impact in the industry over the past decade. This very short-sighted breathlessness makes me wonder if the people who are telling us what to think really know what they are talking about.

Not much surprises me anymore. After more than a decade spent providing boutique services, followed by the last 6 or so years strictly in software, I’ve really earned the increase in grey hairs on my face and head. However, one thing I continue to find absolutely baffling is the way companies and designers often attempt to design their software from the bottom-up, screen-by-agonizing-screen. That approach is categorically wrong. Any design or redesign must start from the systemic level, from the top-down.

What does that mean? Consider an application that most of us are familiar with, iTunes. If Apple came to me and asked me to simply redesign the home page for Videos inside of iTunes, without regard for the rest of the product, they would be setting up me—and the redesign effort itself—for failure. The Videos home page is one screen amidst a veritable tsunami of information. Anything we do to that page will impact the user experience of the entire product. To redesign that screen, large and important as it may be, in isolation is an inherent fail. By changing it without changing the many pages around and relying on it, we would simply be buggering up the overall user interface, no matter how much better that spot redesign might be.

This week, embattled R&B artist Chris Brown closed his Twitter account after a profanity-laced tirade. This makes Brown just the latest public figure to have an embarrassing meltdown and then abashedly terminate their account on the social networking giant.

At the same time, just last week a university student interviewed me to discuss trends in the relationship between social networking and how people behave. Her concern and focus was on the trend of drunk or high college students using texting and Twitter to lash out against boyfriends, ex’es, teachers and other people who have done them wrong. As I told her, this sort of behaviour has been happening since long before modern communication technology existed. The difference is, shouting “I hate Ellen!” from the balcony of your fraternity house is ephemeral and easily forgotten or denied, while texting or Tweeting it becomes an immediate artifact and only strengthens Ellen’s ability to point you out as the jerk you “really are”. One can only guess how many social networking accounts have been closed in the aftermath of a substance-induced tantrum.