Don’t think Sergey and Larry haven’t noticed Mark Zuckerberg‘s latest move: opening the Facebook Platform to anyone willing to develop. Sure, Google has the market on what people are looking for, but Facebook has the ace up its sleeve, that is, the social network. Some may argue that MySpace is bigger, but Facebook is gaining ground and has an arguably better network. Now, you might ask what advantages would having this network give Facebook over the search giant? The answer is distribution. Every new application and feature becomes instantly viral, no advertising needed. Once somebody has added something, a friend will notice and follow, and then their friends, etc. creating a huge snowball effect of distribution. With this sort of power, anything is possible. Perhaps the suits at Google (they have suits?) don’t consider direct competition with the social networking crowd just yet, but as they expand their ventures, you never know where they will end up.

Read: Advertising Age, Time