If you’re close to web development or have been following the news as of late, you may have heard about Google’s new product the plus 1 button. This is Google’s first leap into social media offering customers the opportunity to vote for favourite articles and websites, setup a profile, link it to other products such as YouTube, Flickr and gmail, and even go so far as to tag all the areas in the world where you have lived, but to what end?

Why does Google, a company that is primarily a search engine, want to collect all this information and appear more like a social network?

Most people seem to believe that the primary reason is advertising and that advertising on the web will give way to advertising on social networks. Quite simply, Facebook will soon be in the position where it will be able to deliver ads to the rest of the web, making them completely bespoke for the end user. This will encroach on Google’s market share and pose a threat to any income obtained by Google’s successful Adsense and AdWords services.

A number of studies have shown that time spent on social networking sites is on the increase, whereas time spent on the rest of the internet is on the decline. At this moment, for every minute spent on Facebook, people are spending eight minutes on the web. If the trend continues at its current rate, we will reach a point where people will be spending as much time on Facebook as they do the web.

Facebook profiles provide the network with a plethora of information about the user, from this they are able to create personal, targeted ads and have a much higher chance of converting. When offering a platform like this to advertisers it’s no wonder Google are pulling out all the stops to evolve into something that can deliver the same results.

Only time will tell how this will all pan out but, we believe we’ll be seeing a huge shake up in the industry over the coming months.