Google acquires Facebook

Mountain View (CA), April 1st, 2009 - The internet giant Google (GOOG) surprised the world once again, with the acquisition of the social networking website Facebook, Google's M&A department announced today. The amount of the transaction was kept confidential.

This strategic move brings to Google a highly valuable asset: a gigantic growing structured database of people and people networks. With now both Orkut and Facebook under control, the firm enforces its position inside the social electronic market.

« Essentially our business model will remain the same », Google's PR director Amanda Bentham told us. « Google will provide users with relevant, targeted advertisements, based on their profile, their online conversations, as well as other minor details. We are also developing a "featured suggestions" program, not to mention the "endorsed suggestions" framework, in which if you recommend or convince your friends to attend a special event or buy a specific product, you'll perceive a small fee over the generated revenue. Of course we cannot unveil yet all the exciting new features which will be available to our community; however I can give you a few insights of what has already been integrated in the system.

• Google Trust - Truth above all - How reliable and trustworthy are your friends? Google trust will analyze what you friends tell you and compare this information to what they actually do, based on a variety of sources.
• Google Radar - Track'em all! - This powerful mashup of Google Android, Google Latitude, and Google Maps, builds you a map with the real time location of your friends.
• Google Audio - What you heard, what you said - This service combines Google's search expertise with the latest speech to text technologies to allow you to do searches in the oral conversations you had through the network.
• Google Friends - Reinventing Friendship - Still choosing your friends by default, by filtering people in your geographic neighborhood? This new tool will allow you to find people whose tastes match yours, hence likely to become your buddy and enjoy with you the activities you like.
• Google Twin - Not unique anymore - The huge number of tagged photos uploaded to Facebook allowed us to create a database containing the most important physiological properties of users. Using some sophisticated pattern matching routines, Google Twin will help you to locate people looking really like you, like a brother or a sister, in fact.
• Google One Night Stand - Carpe Noctem - This revolutionary service will connect you with whoever you need for a passionate night, based on your very preferences and demands.
• Google Love - True Love - With the advanced neural network based technology designed by Google's engineers, Google Love's unique algorithm will deliver you a soul mate for a guaranteed everlasting love.
• Google Reality - A richer reality - Wearing our special goggles will offer you a new way to experience reality. Some customizable tags will inform you about almost every detail in your visual field and your surrounding, including of course people. You might use a webcam instead of the googles, but the effect is way less astounding.
• Google Life - Not shared, not lived - At Google, we think that not sharing your life is akin not to live it at all. If this seems weird to you, you might nevertheless agree that openness and exposure, not secrecy, are the key to enjoy a satisfying, powerful, and priviledged relationship with the world. Our world-class publishing software will allow you to generate almost automatically a comprehensive summary, including pictures and comments, of every one of your days: which events you attended, who you met, what you did ; because every day of your life is a unique, intense journey, deserving to be shared and remembered.

Standing under the famous motto "Don't be Evil", Google has developed collaborations with national polices and governmental agencies. It's worth citing Google Ladder, similar to Google Audio, who intercepts keywords and retrieves information from VoIP and phone conversations, and Google Face, similar to Google Twin, who helps to create facial composites and to find some matching individuals. On another hand, Google Suspects, claiming Better safe than sorry, will analyze correlations between online profiles and criminal records to detect potential future misdemeanors.

Some new and innovative paying services will also appear in our offer, specifically targeted to the most wealthy members of the community. To give you a few names, Google Detective, Google Hitman focus on individuals, whereas Google CVcheck, Google PatentHole and Google Intelligence concentrate on industries. We also propose specific expertise, like Google Risk for insurance companies, or Google Score for banks and credit issuers. Last but not least, as a part of our caritative branch, we have also created Google Family, based on digital biology, to help people find who their parents or children are, and Google Whoami for people suffering of amnesia.

We also have big projects for the offline world, but I'm afraid I can't yet disclose too much. »

When asked about privacy concerns, Amanda Bentham raises the shoulders.
« Privacy is really an obsolete issue, only brought on the table by old-fashioned zealots. You have to understand that over the last decades we experienced a crucial paradigm shift toward an open society. Today's youngsters are finding out who are sharing their own views, rather than ridiculously trying to hide them. Live with it, or die with your old prejudices. »