POSTED BY DAN YOUNG

A sure sign of your pending world domination is when Hollywood makes a movie about your success in life. Hollywood never made a film about Larry Page and Sergey Brin, but they did about Mark Zuckerberg. Gets one thinking...

Okay, not really, but everyone knew what the title "The Social Network" referred. Facebook radically changed our lives, how we communicate and our willingness to embrace a shared personal life. If you want to learn about someone, the first place you go is to their Facebook page; there is more than enough information on Facebook to give you a good idea of who a person may be.

During a recent conversation with a friend about the boldness of deactivating your Facebook account—kind of like unplugging from the grid—she made a comment comparing Facebook to Google. To be specific, she said that they could be the next Google. I agreed.

If Google's mission was to index the world, Facebook's could be said to be index everyone.

What made Google so successful in the late 1990s and into the new century was our adoption of their tools. When we needed to find something, ask a question, seek a resource, etc., we used our web browsers to search Google. Today Google has evolved into a company that holds our data, allows our data to be shared, presents websites, processes our emails, runs our smartphones, remembers our searches, tells us where to go, reminds us when we need to be there and ranks what is the best source of information for what we seek. In one way or another, Google has an effect on each of our daily lives; we depend on their data.

While Google has become a monolithic giant, an upstart has come along with the platform, technology and resources to dethrone them as they did to their main rival Microsoft.

Facebook has done an amazing thing: they have convinced users to share personal details of their everyday lives in an environment that is not private. When you establish a profile, you provide an amazing amount of detail as to who you are, what you prefer and with whom you prefer to associate. Despite Google's best efforts to create algorithms to do the same, they have never been able to do what Facebook has.

Now that Facebook has information on over 500 users, it owns a platform on which to provide content—think Farmville and other Facebook apps—and a means of harvesting that information for use by marketing firms, they are poised to become a primary destination for advertising funds in much the same way that Google's AdWords were only a few years back.

Google's business successes came from their knowledge of the aggregate; trends in how we use the Internet. Facebook's strength comes from their knowledge of the individual; they can see trends in how we interact with each other. Knowledge of the individual and the aggregate is more powerful than simply knowledge of the aggregate alone. Facebook has the momentum. If it continues, they could quickly evolve into Google's main rival.