Google, realizing that HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3 are getting awfully close to the power and flexibility of compiled, native apps, created an entire operating system around its , is an entirely web-based platform — it only runs web apps — which provides a fantastic focus on Google’s arsenal of productivity, communication, and content-consumption apps.
Facebook, as a company, is very, very similar to Google. They both have the task of creating compelling web services, organizing the vast amounts of user data that result, and then selling targeted advertising on the back of that data. Those compelling web services used to be very disparate — a social network vs. search — but with
