Is Google's Earnings Miss A Disaster for Facebook?

Google's revenue was up 51% but still missed Wall Street's forecasts. It reported revenue of $3.39 billion, which was slightly short of an expected $3.45 billion. Being Google, the stock tanked after-hours as the market has come to expect stellar earnings every quarter. What was interesting was that Google's CFO blamed the weak numbers on difficulty monetizing social networking traffic such as with its major partner, MySpace. This had led many analysts to question whether monetizing social networking sites is really much hard than we expect.

Microsoft was quick to counter that ad networks on Facebook were doing better than expected. But what exactly does Microsoft expect? Take at MSN Live Search and you'll see Microsoft standards for search are not very high indeed. Meanwhile Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, has been going around selling slices of Facebook priced at $15 billion with nothing but a story as how he plans to make billions. It seems even when Google does badly, it can pull down its competitors. Was there a jedi mind-trick behind Google's earning's explaination? Facebook took a beating after Zuckerberg's failed Beacon initiative and even the once adoring media has now decided Facebook Apps are 'a waste of time'. Are fundamental questions about the viability of advertising on social networks going to undermine Facebook's bubble-like valuation of $15 billion. If Facebook was a publicly traded company, I think traders would be dumping the stock right about now.