Google has always been about getting people connected to the content they are looking for as quickly as possible. They even publish how quickly, in milliseconds, they perform a search.

This has been a much different strategy from that employed in the dotcom boom days of the late 1990s when "stickiness" was a prized metric and mantra. The more eyeballs stuck to a site the longer the better.

Google chose quick over sticky but was that a good business strategy?

Facebook likes sticky over quick and it seems to be working. Nielsen estimates that US Internet users spent nearly 2 hours on Google in March 2010.

They spent nearly 7 hours, or 3.5 times longer on Facebook.

Although Facebook revenues are secret, you could argue that Google makes more money per user/minute than Facebook. However, look at all the future opportunities to monetize all that extra time that people spend on Facebook versus Google. There’s a lot of low hanging fruit that Facebook can pluck.

The Facebook experience is also much richer — you get to see content from your family, friends, and contacts — versus Google’s plain vanilla page with a blinking cursor inside a search box.

I appreciate Google’s quick in-and-out policy but if I were an investor I’d prefer a much stickier strategy.

[Editor’s Note: Tom cross-posted this to Silicon Valley Watcher. –mrh]