PALO ALTO -- — Google Inc. is used to being the center of attention, the giant that executives at other Internet companies wish Silicon Valley would shut up about already.
For the moment, they've got their wish. People here can't stop talking about Facebook Inc.
Commanding their attention: the social networking site's rocketing growth, cheeky business strategies and staggering valuation.
Microsoft Corp. last month took a small stake in Facebook that valued the company at $15 billion. The deal may have positioned Facebook's 23-year-old co-founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to one day supplant Google co-founder Sergey Brin as the technology industry's youngest self-made billionaire.
Brin, whose company lost the bidding war to Microsoft, downplayed the defeat at a recent gathering for analysts, saying, "We don't feel at a higher level that we need to own everything successful on the Internet."
Maybe not. Google's spectacular success has made it the seventh-most valuable company in the United States. Still, after years of all-Google-all-the-time, it's Facebook's turn in the spotlight.
Started in a Harvard University dorm room less than four years ago, Facebook spread like wildfire among college students. Last year, it opened membership to the world, and the wildfire is still raging. Facebook now has more than 54 million users, second among social networking sites behind only Beverly Hills-based MySpace. And it's sucking up Web traffic and Silicon Valley engineering talent.
Presidential hopefuls and entertainment heavyweights seek out Facebook's executives. Venture capitalists and software developers stalk its employees in coffee shops and on the site itself. Users post love songs about it on YouTube. Programmers and marketers pack conferences devoted to understanding the site better. Stanford University even offers a course in creating free software for Facebook.
One ex-Google employee who recently joined Facebook's ranks called it "that company that shows up once in a very long while," meaning that it is bursting with the creative intensity that set Mountain View, Calif.-based Google apart when it was smaller.
As Google aims to organize the world's information, Facebook aims to connect the world's people. On Facebook, high school and college kids mingle with baby boomers and retirees, squeezing their social and professional lives into minimalist profile pages they load with photos, games, polls and updates on their activities.
