Even though it is best known as an on-line retailer, Amazon.com, Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) is a major player in the cloud. With its new Graph Search, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), the social media giant, could become just as prominent in Big Data. For Foolish investors, that could provide a tremendous boost for the share price of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB).
The cloud is the provision of computing services (hardware and software) over a network, generally the Internet. Big Data is the term for utilizing the massive amounts of information that exceed the capabilities of traditional software packages to capture, manage, and process for commercial purposes. From an article in USA Today about Big Data:
The potential revenue from both the cloud and Big Data is enormous.
Needless to say, this has drawn behemoths such as Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), among others, into the sector. Amazon is a dominant player in providing services for the cloud, which Gartner, Inc. (NYSE:IT), a research group, estimates to be a market of over $100 billion already. Deepfield, another research entity, estimates that one-third of Internet users visit a website powered by Amazon Web Services, its unit for the cloud.
From its start selling books over the Internet, Amazon developed an expertise in building advanced computer systems that has evolved into a position of primacy in the cloud. From searchcloudcomputing.com, the top players in the cloud for 2012 were Amazon at #1, and Microsoft at #9. With its new Graph Search, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) could ascend to a similar lofty perch in Big Data.
Graph Search is a feature that “helps users find connections to people and places that have always existed in the graph. In a sense, it’s a clean interface into the breadth of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) data that people have entered into Facebook, but contextualized to each user.”
Having over one billion users that account for one-fifth of the daily page views on the Internet, the amount of data that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)encounters in a continuim renders to it a tremendous competitive advantage for exploiting Big Data opportunities. Google and Microsoft are also similarly situated due to the dominance of the Web browser and search engine for each.
One of the new areas of Big Data development that Facebook should command is in trend analysis for social media interactions. About this, an article in USA Today reports that, “Facebook is heavily invested in this science for reasons of economic survival. The company reports your likes to marketers eager to in turn serve you up offerings you’re supposed to crave.”
From the Big Data efforts of Facebook, advertising and marketing efforts will be much more efficient for clients. That will make the results of Graph Search even more valuable. As an example of this, Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ:CMCSA) found that addressable advertising over the television to narrowly defined groups such as renters was 56% more efficient and 38% more effective than mass advertising.
For this type of Big Data deployment utilizing social media, according to the UK market research firm Trendstream’s Global Web Index (GWI), the top five for active users in December 2012 were:
- Google+
- Youtube
- Qzone
The article Will Facebook become the Amazon of Big Data? originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Jonathan Yates.
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