Internet tools to shake up a broken political system

There's a lot of misunderstanding over Facebook's strategy, I have no insider information, but it seems pretty clear to me what's going on.

There are two dominant advertising players online, Google & Facebook. Google is great at ads based on what you already know you want, Facebook is great at ads to convince you to want something. It's pretty obvious that the latter is what a lot of advertisers want, and it is 100% Facebook's strategy to own that.

Many people see Facebook as the new AOL, a walled garden, but the companies that do well on the Internet are the ones that make the Internet better, not the ones that try to control it. With the Open Graph, it's clear Facebook understands this, and is looking to integrate into the web as much as possible. It's all setting up the day when Facebook lets every website put their ads on it, just like Google AdSense.

But first, Facebook needs the whole web to organize itself socially, then they can take that information and serve really good social ads all over the web. As a website owner, you'll soon be able to do the calculation over whether Facebook or Google ads generate more revenue for your site. That's the big battle to come, and is the biggest threat to Google.

It's unlikely one will be clearly dominant over the other, because different sites have different purposes. Most likely, Facebook ads will do well on a lot of the sites where Google ads don't -- the more social, "hang out" places like College Humor, Reddit, internet forums, and lifestyle oriented blogs. There are quite a lot of sites like that, so Facebook's advertising business has the potential to be much bigger than Google's -- and more importantly, it can provide much-needed revenue for sites innovating socially on the web.