Dare Obasanjo notes that Google faces a real threat from facebook (et. al.) - first, he quotes Jason Kottke:

Think of it this way. Facebook is an intranet for you and your friends that just happens to be accessible without a VPN. If you're not a Facebook user, you can't do anything with the site...nearly everything published by their users is private.

I can definitely see this happening in Facebook groups that get (and stay) active - the only potential problem I see getting in the way is spammers joining groups and defacing the Walls in them - and I suspect that Facbook will respond to that. In any event, if this stays big, Google has a problem - as dare sums up:

The way you get disrupted is by focusing on competitors who are just like you instead of actually watching the marketplace. I wonder how Google will react when they eventually realize how deep this problem runs?

And there's the challenge for Google - not from someone else getting search better, but from someone bypassing the entire problem. If you trust your network to get you a large enough percentage of the answers you need, then the value of Google ads will drop accordingly. That's a big if, of course...

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