Can Google Go Social?

I have been watching Google’s frenetic quest to find an opening into the social revolution for a long time.

To date, what we have seen are experiments and acquisitions.

Having Gundotra lead social at Google reminds me of President Obama tapping General Petraeus to take on Afghanistan. It feels calming at the moment, but might not actually lead to the desired outcome.

On one one side, half-hearted hobbies that senior management hopes will grow into something great. In this category we have the more-or-less failed social network Orkut and now Wave, which both surfaced from the company’s ‘one day a week’ tinkering culture.

On the other, acquisitions like Jaiku and Dodgeball, which were innovative and groundbreaking, but were allowed to die in red tape, and where the innovative founders — like Jyri Engstrom of Jaiku, and Dennis Crowley of Dodgeball, soon left the company. Or great fat purchases like YouTube, which have proven to be less valuable than market prices.

Then, Google staged a relatively public search for a leader to move them to social. (Despite losing Jyri and Dennis, either of which could have done great things for the firm.) The result? Can’t find the right person. Catarina Fake couldn’t be lured back into corporate deadness, I guess. And Bradley Horowitz, who runs Google Talk, Grandcentral, Blogger and Picasa, wasn’t the right guy, apparently.

So now we have Vic Gundotra annointed as Mr Social, a guy who has made great strides at Google Mobile, getting Android into the market with a bang. But is he Mr Social?

Having Gundotra lead social at Google reminds me of President Obama tapping General Petraeus to take on Afghanistan. It feels calming at the moment, but might not actually lead to the desired outcome.

Om Malik puts it this way: Vic is a great product manager, focused on features. But social is more than a veneer of games, gestures, music, comments.

Om Malik, Slide, Vic Gundotra & The Un-Social Reality of Google

Social is more than just features. I’ve been saying for a while that in order to understand social and win over the social web, companies need to understand people. I’m not sure Google is capable of understanding people on that level, and that’s the reason why the company strikes out whenever it tries. There are rumors Google co-founder Sergey Brin championed the acquisition of Slide. He also championed Google Wave (which is shutting down) and the poorly conceived Google Buzz.

We are in a great migration away from a web of pages to a web of flow, where streams connect us and allow us to share links, comments, photos, games, locations, lists, and even larger social objects in the future. And Google has only had the smallest involvement in that expansion.

Google made a pile by harvesting the latent value of all the social gestures we were leaving around the web in the form of links. These form the core of Page Rank and Google’s search/advertising business.

This was born in the paleolithic of the social web, where mostly we were wandering around as hunter-gatherers, turning over rocks, based on keyword search. The idea of social in those days was to send email alerts to people so they’d remember to read your blog and post comments.

But the social web has grown based on social networks — relationships between people — not hyperlinks between web pages. We are in a great migration away from a web of pages to a web of flow, where streams connect us and allow us to share links, comments, photos, games, locations, lists, and even larger social objects in the future. And Google has only had the smallest involvement in that expansion. But they desperately want in on the next wave, but they haven’t found a formula yet. It’s not Wave or Buzz, obviously. And now they are plotting a knockoff of Facebook: how 2009!

There are many unplowed fertile fields out there, where Google’s scale and engineering soul could do great things. As just one example, modern social network research has shown that the social ‘scenes’ we are situated in — the millions of people that form the ‘friends of my friends’ friends’ network — are the single best predictor of our likelihood to be fat, smoke, or be happy. And by extension, buy Chevrolets, listen to Country music, or read manga. And no services have tapped into that reality, yet, except in the most inadvertent ways. (For more background see Social Scenes: The Invisible Calculus Of Culture, It’s Betweenness That Matters, Not Your Eigenvalue: The Dark Matter Of Influence and Jeff Jarvis on The Hunt For The Elusive Influencer.)

This is why actions like buying Slide are likely to be diversions, like Jaiku and Dodgeball turned out to be. Meanwhile, there are real advances to be made — like building sociality into the operating platforms of the future. Obviously Google is in a position to do that with Android and Chrome, but I honestly don’t think they know what to build.

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Are Blogs Dying?

Marshall Kirkpatrick recently griped about Ask.com’s blog search service closing down.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, R.I.P. World’s Greatest Blogsearch

Searching the blogs, scanning the posts, feed-powered search: there used to be more startups offering blogsearch than there are characters in a Twitter message today. But no more. Today blogsearch engines fade away all the time and almost no one notices.

But when Ask.com shuttered its blogsearch engine this month, I noticed. It made me sad, because it was the best blogsearch engine in the whole world. And now it’s gone. You, dear reader, probably didn’t even notice. But let me explain what we’re missing out on now that it’s gone.

[…]

That’s a real shame.

[…]

Sometimes you’re looking to see what experts in a field are writing in long-form on their blogs. Not spitting out on Twitter. Not posting on a static website. Blog posts. There is an incredible body of knowledge in that medium, and search by popularity was a really useful way to sort it. Surely someone offers a similar service. Who?

Bruce Sterling, who noticed Kirkpatrick’s howling when I hadn’t, suggests that it’s not just the difficulty of competing with Google blog search, but that blogs are dying as a medium:

Bruce Sterling, Dead Media Beat: blog search

Why does ‘almost no one notice’ that blogsearch enterprises are fading away? Because nobody notices that blogs are fading away. The technical ecosystem around blogs is disintegrating, being folded into other structures. Three years ago, I said at SXSW that there wouldn’t be many blogs around in ten years. That leaves ‘em seven years to continue to dwindle in interest and relevance. There will still be SOME blogs in seven years, no matter how firmly disintermediated they are by social media, and the many things that follow social media. There are still some personal computer bulletin board systems around today, too. But look at the trend. Compare today’s reality to the hectic illusions surrounding blogs three years ago.

There is certainly something to what Bruce has to say. Interest in long-format blogging is dropping, even while it is being incorporated into traditional media.

The rise of streaming tools, though, is leading to a new state, where long-format blogging is being imploded, turned into content for the short-format stream, like radio was cannibalized for TV.

We’ll see a new logical layering. At the bottom will be the web of pages, a vast archive of HTML connected by links: a giant hypertext.

At the top will be the web of flow, as typified now by Twitter microstreaming. Users will consider themsleves as ‘logged into’ Twitter (or other microstreams) where microsyntactic references, via URLs, hashtags, or other techniques will allow users to pull in larger format or richer content, like text, audio, video, or images. This is where people will operate, share, comment, question, and argue converationally.

In between will be a swirling nexus of ‘engines of meaning’ — algorithms and filters, assemblages and indexes, and the social networks where we connect — tools that people use to mark, retain, annotate, and find snippets of meaning.

This inherently devalues the materials accumulating at the bottom, like last week’s newspapers, old issues of magazines, and yesterday’s blog posts.

A few years ago we seemed to live in our RSS readers, and the metronome of our media diet was timed to author’s posting cycles, or our feeding cycles which was more like the daily newspaper than a stock ticker.

We’ve shifted to stream time, and the tempo is much, much faster.

Techmeme seems slow, when it formerly seemed like the breakingest place to be for tech.

And the great majority of chatter about the breaking news stories is in the stream, not in the comments on blogs, and not in the blogs themselves. While a great deal of thoughtful and expository writing still goes on, the average joe is dropping out of long format writing, even as an aspiration. It’s easier to just talk, and tweeting (or Facebook) seems more like talking or texting, and less hard work.

Social Business: 10 Minute Sprint From 140 Characters Conference

My slides and notes from today’s talk at 140 Characters Conference in LA. It was a ten minute sprint, so I didn’t get to elaborate the various points very deeply.]


I want to paint a quick picture of what I believe we will see emerge over the next five to ten years, as the impacts of real-time social tools and the emerging web culture trickle through into business.

Today we are only that the start, one side of a bridge leading over to a dramatically different way of doing business.


In voluntary and open social networks, the individual has replaced the group as the basic, irreducible particle.

In these contexts, our rights and responsibilities do not derive from membership in groups: they are unalienable.

Of course, individuals in social networks immediately begin to create relationships — based on the nature of what the social tools allow. This is why I have characterized social tools for over the past 10 years as ‘tools that shape culture.’

And it is through other people that we are made human.


The social business will be much more a village than an army.

They aren’t really structured to conquer other villages, and they won’t operate like football teams.

Mostly, businesses will be more fluid and less solid, with people cooperating and competing for resources, making deals and agreements, exchanging goods and services, dating, raising families, building and tearing things down, and lots of comings and goings.

And bigger businesses can scale from this social scale belonging. But it’s a fractal sort of scaling, where the same sorts of organizational principles are at work in the large and in the small, which is how most bottom-up things work.

As in a village, professional reputation will be more important than titles, connections more important than rank, and authority will be derived from connections not control.

This is based on the maxim that I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.


The salient attribute of real-time conversations is that they are brand spanking new: the new ones were typed moments ago.

The interesting thing about real-time isn’t that what’s important is fleeting. No, the salient attribute is that what’s breaking is brand spanking new: the newest Tweets were typed moments ago.

At the beginning of some rising trend (critical to some business) is a single tweet, and a small number of followers who read it and then pass it on. The point where the pebble hits the surface of the pond, and the ripples start to spread.

We are trying hard to hear the earliest whispers of things that are critical. Small talk is big again.


Abundance economics means that we won’t rely on search: search is based on scarcity.

Imagine that all critical information is available, publicly, and the most important breaking news is a few seconds (at most) away. In this world the problem won’t be finding what you want, but minimizing the torrent so that you have a small number of things to look at.

This is as true inside of a 1000 person company as in the open web.

Increasingly, we will switch to a social connection mode to filter and find for us. Our networks will become engines of meaning, as Bruce Sterling said.

Everything we want to find has been found, and will find us through our social connections. Like head colds and happiness.


We are not sharing space online, although it the conventional wisdom says we are. We are sharing time. Time has become a shared resource.

Our time is increasingly not our own, in a good way, as we move into a streamed model of connection.

Individual time becomes less of a reality, and a shared thread of time will become the norm — shared with those that are most important to you and those that reciprocate. This will change the basic structure of work.

Time is increasingly less linear, less mechanical; but more subjective and plastic.

Individuals will choose to trade personal productivity for connectedness, as voices in the stream ask for help, pointers, and introduction. Connectedness will trump other obligations, specifically timeliness.


The real-time flow of social tools like Twitter, and the myriad vertical apps that will adopt the open follower model, will become the bloodstream of social business.

The flow is where everything critical appears first, and where everyone will congregate.

Flow will become the dominant motif of all important social tools in this next era of the Web. This will be the ‘still point of a turning world’: paradoxically, the place where the stream runs hardest will be where we are most at rest.

The nexus for all the imploded bits of the previous web of pages, where the flotsom of links, messages, pats on the back, questions and alerts all jumble together.

That’s where we’ll be. We will be the engines of meaning, sorting, passing things along, choosing who to follow and who to forget, transmitting ideas, decisions, and recommendations.

This is where business will be done, plots will be hatched, and deals will be done. This will be the center of everything.



Building this won’t be easy. But we are moving into a new, post-industrial world, and new ways will have to be designed so that business can thrive.

This is like pressures that drive us to build new infrastructure in the real world, or the societal pressures that lead us to make basic changes: like universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and child labor laws.

Whatever else social business comes to be, it has to be based on how people operate when they feel most free, most creative, most engaged, and most needed. We have to build a way of working where the people doing the work matter as much as the work.

Whatever else, social business must be that.

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The Future Of Money: Bruce Sterling

When you are interested in magic, you might want to talk to a witch doctor, so when I started to think about the future of money, I thought I should talk to a science fiction author. Who better? As it so happens, I know one.

Bruce Sterling is a well-known science fiction author, perhaps best known for his contributions to what is now known as “cyberpunk”: near future, post industrial, dystopic settings with alienated loners struggling against megacorporations and artificially intelligent machines. He won Hugo Awards for “Bicycle Repainrman” and “Taklamakan”.

Sterling is responsible for a lot of neologisms, like “Spime” which he coined in 1994:

[via Word Spy]

The next stage is an object that does not exist yet. It needs a noun, so that we can think about it. We can call it a “Spime,” which is a neologism for an imaginary object that is still speculative. A Spime also has a kind of person who makes it and uses it, and that kind of person is somebody called a “Wrangler.” At the moment, you are end-using Gizmos. My thesis here, my prophesy to you, is that, pretty soon, you will be wrangling Spimes.

The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.

Spimes have identities, they are protagonists of a documented process.

They are searchable, like Google. You can think of Spimes as being auto-Googling objects.

—Bruce Sterling, “When Blobjects Rule the Earth,” SIGGRAPH, August 1, 2004

There are a lot of spimes in the world today: soda machines that dispatch trucks to refill them, xerox machines that diagnose paper jams and text message people to unjam them, and the Challenger space shuttle that twitters its position in space. Bruce saw all that coming.

Among a long history of projects and writing, he is now author of a blog at Wired Magazine, called Beyond The Beyond, where you can see the video of his talk from the recent Reboot conference in Copenhagen, which comes across as something like a graduation day speech. (I thought i was hilarious, but it incensed quite a few of my more serious techie friends.)

We chatted in Copenhagen over breakfast, and then we caught up a few days later, when I was back the States and he was in Torino, Italy.

Some highlights:

  • Bruce pointed me at Experientia and its head, Mark Vanderbeeken, an Italian group that has been exploring alternative money, and the website they have set up working with Heather Moore and the Vodaphone User Experience group, called KashKlash, for which Bruce provided the name. I plan to explore that site in depth.
  • Bruce uses two of his definitions to characterize two ends of the spectrum of possible scenarios.

    The first is Gothic Hightech, and he uses the example of Bernie Madoff, who wormed his way into the convention world of investment and banking, and boiled off $50B, leaving thousands wrecked. He seems to imply that this endlessly possible, and that an episode could be much more devastating. Or perhaps he’s suggesting the current Econolypse is no different? That handing over our money to the system is inherently dumb, a form of institutionalized and voluntary slavery?

    The second term is Favela Chic, decidedly low tech approaches taken by the dispossessed, outside the orbit of bourgeois society. These folks don’t line up with the world of banks, so they opt for paracurrencies, like cell minutes. He points out that the transfer of this sort of currency does not necessitate handing something over physically, like paper money. Like electronic fund transfers, you can give cell minutes to someone by just telling them a code to use. So it is an anonymous transfer. “No tax. Crosses international borders.”

  • He talked about Bernard NotHaus, the guy behind Liberty Dollars, a form of precious metal alternative currency. He attracted the interest of survialists, gold currency nuts, and so on. He’s been arrested by the Feds.


  • Bruce isn’t too big on the local currency movement, suggesting that there is something anti-immigrant and protectionist about it — an “aggressive regionalism” — that has sinister purposes. “It’s usually people who have lived there a long time, trying to make it hard for outside businesses to get in.” (This is one of the places where Bruce and I don’t see eye to eye, and it was obvious that my arguments about a more resilient local economy fell short of convincing him.)


  • It was interesting that Bruce compares the making of money in virtual worlds with Web business in general.


  • In response to me asking about the possible Big Brother overtones of having digital money — where all transactions could be traced by the state — he mentioned a Thomas Disch short story where after Mom cooked a nice meal for her husband and kids, they each tipped her “75¢” (with his unfailing ear for a detail that pushes the story by making it concrete). “At this point, every sort of human interchange has been rationalized into an economic activity, and there is no room left for an act of kindness.”

    Bruce suggests that a return to a feudal honor society could come about. I asked about a world of the near future with less governance, more rogue cities and regions. Will fiat currencies fall in use, and be replaced by commodities, like cell minutes, energy credits, or the like? Bruce argues that these regoins are parasitic on the more well-off, better managed areas that surround them or abut them. Bazaars emerge, he says. “I look to the Chinese model, by which I mean the offshore Chinese, not the communists.” He argues that they set up clan-based banking or production businesses, based on petty bourgeois activities. “There’s a certain rough justice in it [transactions in the bazaar sealed with a handshake], because you see the guy every week when your wife is there buying rutabagas.”

  • Bruce suggested that governments worldwide might drop all conventional taxes, and simply make their citizens pay fees for environmental impacts: for their CO2, their wastewater, the trash they make that isn’t recycled. That, he suggests, would lead to a rapid behavioral change.

  • My favorite Sterling quip follows an observation I made, where I suggested that in a future where paying via cell phone becomes commonplace then a large part of the economy might be streaming through cell networks. At which point, governments might want to step in and nationalize the cell networks since they threaten their control of the economy. Bruce said, “Or the phone companies may turn around and take over the government.”

A truly enjoyable experience, and thought provoking in unexpected ways, which is pretty much what I expected from Bruce Sterling, I guess.


The Future Of Money series is sponsored in part by Neo.org

The Corporatization of Memetrackers: Netscape, Digg, Rojo, and our Engines of Meaning

Rafat Ali reports on the Netscape memetracker relaunch, which is just the first of a spate of news in the memetracker space:

[from Netscape.com To Be Relaunched As a Digg-Like Site; Calacanis Heading It]

The storied Netscape.com will be revived again by AOL, and will relaunch soon as a Digg-like user-driven news/aggregation site with Jason Calacanis at the helm, sources have told paidContent.org. Some Netscape-Calacanis rumors first surfaced on SV gossip site Valleywag.

The original Netscape division has been more than decimated over the last few years and layoffs have been almost routine these last few months. The new Netscape.com will be headed by Calacanis, who came in through AOL’s acquisition of Weblogs Inc. Not clear what role Weblogs, Inc.’s blogs would play but both divisions would report in Calacanis, according to the sources. He already reports to Jim Bankoff, executive VP of Programming & Products, who would also oversee the Netscape.com changes.

Calacanis has been a big Digg fan and has written about it on his blog a few times. He has yet to respond to our query about these details, but said on his own blog in response to rumours: “There are no details to share right now, but if that changes I’ll certainly let you know.”

What is not clear is whether the new Netscape will stick to just technology news aggregation like Digg, or go the general consumer route. The latter seems the most likely.



Jason has demonstrated a good ability to serve up what consumers want, a la Engadget, and ‘gets’ what makes Digg work: the wisdom of crowds, or perhaps, the positive feedback loops in mob dynamics.

Don’t get me wrong: positive feedback, unchecked, can be a not nice thing. It just sounds good. The known problems of memetrackers — the “heaping on” behavior of authors or participants can polarize the system, biases in the majority can lead to dissenting perspectives being squelched, new voices are shut out — are likely to be an ongoing issue for anyone moving in the space.

The dynamics of memetrackers — which stories that are breaking, what announcements are racing through the blogosphere, whose new insights are being discussed — represnts a critical turning point in media, demonstrated by the growing importance of the Diggs, memeorandums, and Tailranks out there.

It’s the algorithm, the machine, harnessed to the collective insights of a body of people, that is replacing the editorial management of media. Instead of the CNN newsteam deciding what’s hot, tech.memeorandum’s machinery moves certain hot stories to the top of the page, or the activities of a handful of folks at Digg leads to a cascade on interest in a new product announcement.

That’s all well and good, and probably better — and obviously cheaper — than conventional editorial controls. But the control of the algorithm, the inner workings of the magic box that determines what’s hot and what’s not, is in the hands of the wizards that work for these new media gatekeepers. Yes, the myriad decisions of tens of millions of individuals still factor in heavily — like the ranking of blogs at tech.memeorandum being based on popularity, which is based on links and traffic — and the more explicit voting stuff at services like Rojo’s new Mojo, a personalized memetracking tool (see the TechCrunch and Read/Write Web for solid, in-depth reviews).

The answer to feed glut might be memetrackers, where we rely on the machinery and the harnessed collective grey matter of many, many others, to guide us to the right stuff to read, the right viewpoints to test, the right insights to be exposed to. But the corporatization of memetrackers is my biggest concern. Will there be a consistent weighting of more established, more conservative voices? Will the hippies, dreamers, and iconoclasts be weeded out? Will thoughtful and critical analysis be avalanched by hot meme-chasing newshounds who loudly proclaim love for everything hot? I wonder.

But there is no doubt that my primitive hunter/gatherer model of roaming around looking for good stuff will be augmented with something more overarching. Bruce Sterling once wrote about this:

[from Order Out Of Chaos]

Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. In a future of information auto-organized by folksonomy, we may not even have words for the kinds of sorting that will be going on; like mathematical proofs with 30,000 steps, they may be beyond comprehension. But they’ll enable searches that are vast and eerily powerful. We won’t be surfing with search engines any more. We’ll be trawling with engines of meaning.

And the abiding question for me is “who is writing those algorithms?” If we can get to the point where we — the eventual users of these engines — have some say, or at least an insight, into the inner workings of the engines, I would more happily embrace them.