For the record: What Facebook is and wants to be is actually an <i>enforceable personal relations layer</i> on top of the web stack.<p>Uber agrees to send in my name a “Pay me £7.23 for that shared ride” to my Facebook friends, but not to people for whom I can’t prove I know well enough. Tinder shows shared relations with strangers. That is a powerful web of features unlocked thanks to this. That’s why building an API was such a key early change of what Facebook was.<p>Typically, Twitter does something similar to Facebook on the surface (a news feed) but is not planning on serving as an authentication layer, so they do a lot less to address grievers, inauthentic accounts and lately, unwanted political influence.<p>The News Feed was the first key feature, built internally and it boosted the business model that Facebook has started leveraging: targeted advertising. But neither the News Feed, not advertising is the core of Facebook — no more than ads are at the core of Google.<p>Google wants to leverage artificial intelligence to organise the world’s information. That your friends matter to you and that you trust them more, and that you want computers to tell who they are is what’s at the core of Facebook; the recent pivot to communities is clearly in that line: you also trust and are willing to help people that you might not have met before because you belong to certain groups, communities.<p>Ads are a simple and effective way to finance both projects. Because management had to place ad-focused people high up, they took over a bit of the attention, but leaders at both companies know to focus on the end-goal.<p>I can easily imagine Facebook making more money from transaction fee, or distributing 3D-content; I can imagine Google making more money similarly (typically, CPA is kind of that). Both have tried, and the results were underwhelming, and will most likely try again.