How serious should you take Facebook?

This trimmed-down article was worth sharing with all of our readers.

Facebook is big and getting bigger. One day Google may be just another member of the social network. With the arrival of Facebook Places, Facebook is showing (not for the first time) that it has the power to steamroll friends and competitors alike.

People can gripe all they want about privacy concerns, but with half a billion members, Facebook is the only game in town, so leaving comes at pretty huge costs. And people developing new apps and services that might be within Facebook's reach? They should be afraid. Does this all sound familiar? It's not too tough a riddle: Just replace "Facebook" with "Google" and it all holds true.

The question is, how soon until Facebook takes on Google directly?

Places is the latest example of Facebook adding a feature that knocks a would-be competitor out of center stage. It's not a new program that requires a new account and a new set of friends — it's just Facebook, working in real time in real physical space.

Facebook has eaten into others' businesses in the past. Twitter is growing, but not at the rate that Facebook is, in part because the Facebook News Feed is essentially Twitter.

Facebook is already encroaching on Google in some niches. Facebook is the third-largest source of online video , according to comScore, and I verified that this doesn't include any of the YouTube videos that you can see in the Facebook News Feed (videos served by Google and apparently stripped of ads). YouTube is very firmly planted in the No. 1 spot and will be hard to topple. Nevertheless, Facebook is sneaking up on YouTube while using YouTube to its advantage.

News and search are also under fire. In a fascinating twist, Google's machine logic is being supplanted by Facebook's crowd logic. Why build an autonomous artificial intelligence when you can devote the same programming resources to building systems to translate the whims of the masses into usable results? Why stop at music, video or food recommendations, the stuff you see already posted on the walls of your friends? Why not turn the sum total of 500 million people's wall postings into humanly intelligent news blotters and search results?

Despite its size, Google's lost ground on social networking will hurt when it comes to harnessing the masses. A few months ago, after Google launched the poorly received Buzz social news feed, Fortune's Jessi Hempel wrote that "Google still holds users' attention with Gmail, the best free e-mail system available." However, she concluded that Google needs to "find a better way to harness the social aspects of the Web and organize it into an improved search product, before it's too late."

Like Google, Facebook isn't overly concerned about our privacy concerns. Keeping people's information private is not the point, and it never will be. The promise of connecting you to people, or you to information, comes at the cost of sharing some of your own information. That's food for the billion-dollar ad monsters who pay well to feast. Go too private, and Facebook's coolest features — like Places — will leave you behind. Hint: This is why they don't reform when people ask nicely.

Google is fighting a lot of different wars now. Facebook may be the new Google on the Internet, but as mobile platforms go, Google may be the new Apple, or at least the latest hegemon to beat Apple at its own game. And with dominant positions in both search and video, Google has plenty of weapons to fight a war of the online worlds, too.

That being said, Google still needs to watch its back. E-mail is already less of a draw for kids and twenty-somethings. No social effort by Google has taken root. And Facebook has a log-in-required lock on the majority of its audience that Google doesn't really have. Deciding to create a Facebook account is easy, but once you have built that account into your own hall of frenemies, you're not apt to tear it down again. The more connections you've made on Facebook, the harder it is to pull yourself away. And by a tragic turn of circumstance for Google, the very fact that you have a Facebook account makes it about a million times easier to ditch an old e-mail account.

Watch out, Google. You may have become king of the mountain faster than anyone before you, but that only means you've set a record for Facebook to break.