Currently viewing the tag: "facebook"
Google is striving hard to promote Google Plus, and that’s not bad. But the way it does it, altering the search results – that’s bad.
Facebook shows you what your friends are doing, reading or watching; that’s not bad either. But the way it does that, by capturing you in your own “relevant circle”, all over the web – that’s bad.
Being evil is not a full time job, but mainly a constant (wrong) way of doing things. Being stupid – likewise.
The secret solution for getting out of this vicious circle, where the user is captive in his own circle of relevant content (be it relevant for the user or just important for the ones keeping him locked in) is simply to let the user out.
A single query can be run in two instances, on two tables: one table can contain the data relevant to that person, the other one – the data relevant to humankind (or whatever you’d like to call a generic interest, like war news, politics, culture). Therefore, by simply splitting the screen, the user should be able to see both the search results that are relevant for himself and the results that are relevant “per se“. Somewhere between personal relevant results, relevant ads could be integrated as well and I’m guessing that would make them even more visible.
Imagine the left side of the screen page showing what your friends are saying about the subject you’re searching for, while the right side of the page / screen – what Times or “Some Important Opinion Maker” are saying about the same subject. (The two buttons that Google is showing in the upper right corner are not exactly it: you should not have to switch between personal and non-personal results, but to be able to see them both, distinctly, in the same time).
I believe people are able to follow two streams, although most marketing researches may show the opposite. We do not process the two data streams in parallel, that’s true, but we are doing serial processing so fast that it becomes more convenient to say that we can do parallel processing in short bursts.
On the other hand, splitting the results may just save the newspapers, that are right now unfairly fighting against your friends, for your attention; it just shouldn’t be the case for a search engine to ponder wether you should first read what the president is announcing or look at your friends’ new pictures. These two types of content belong to separate categories that are mixed together only by accident.
There should be no way mixing the results so badly that no one could tell what’s being pulled and what’s pushed; the two columns of your search page should be called “only for you” and “for everybody, including you“.
I see no strong argument against this split (besides some technical elbow grease), given the condition that no player wants the information to be truncated or misinterpreted.
Simplicity and elegance are said to be the optimal minimum, but not less than that. If showing only one feed that is the main stream of revenue and customers for so many people, generates so much discontent and disorientation, then it’s time for two feeds of results.
Let’s say you’re a lazy person and you like to keep your stuff well spread all over your desk. The only condition is that everything should be at hand, anytime you might need it.
Now, take Katango: this app is like a janitor that decides you need some order in your life and starts organizing your shit. So far so good.
The problem is, it never tells you what are the criteria it used! There you see some green stuff, over there there is some round stuff, in a corner there is some old stuff… Where’s your stuff?!
How is this new order better than your disorder? It isn’t. What’s your benefit? You may… “feel” better organized.
What’s Katango’s benefit? Now it knows everything about you, your books, your places, your friends’ education, their birth places, birth dates, hobbies. Pretty much everything.
I think it’s a fair trade. New York Times thinks the same!
There are two big hounds that wanted a piece of Facebook: Microsoft and China. Microsoft has just been served, China is next in line.
As Facebook announced their Skype based voice and video call, Microsoft looks a bit more sane paying those eight billion for Skype. I imagine MS found out about this deal / road-map of Skype’s the minute the due diligence procedures started. Balmer must have said: “Guys, it doesn’t matter how much are they asking for their service, we are going to buy our way into Facebook! This door was never supposed to be opened for us”.
I don’t say it was necessarily a good idea, but it surely was something MS took into consideration.
The other hound, China, as Forbes reports, is looking so far away from its Great Wall: China wants to buy 1.2 billion of Facebook stock through Citibank . Chang, at Forbes: “Chinese leaders clearly view social media as a threat to their rule, especially after seeing its force-multiplying effect in the ongoing Arab Spring protests that have toppled governments. [...] And they hope to do that as part of their comprehensive campaign to dominate the conversation about China—not just inside the country but around the world as well“
Err, why would they hope to control the conversation about China…? 750 million Facebook users, Zynga raising (supposedly) 1 billion IPO, Microsoft injecting 8 billion… I don’t know, for me it looks China wants something else but censorship.
China owns the world production; now they are very close to partly owning the biggest worldwide communication network, and you are talking about Chinese government feeling threatened??
When I say “ugly”, I say futile, un-beautiful, hard to understand, non-intuitive, crooked, difficult, sterile thing.
An ugly GUI is something you only use because you need the service behind that GUI. The companies that don’t care about it, they don’t care about their users. Or, worse, they are so lazy and are making so much money, that there’s no way they would change anything for their customers.
The uglier an interface, the more probable the developers forgot they were building things for human beings; instead, these developers are building things for… things.
The Silver Medal goes to Gmail:
The Gold Medal goes to Facebook settings panel:
The only problem is those two giants are spreading their “ugly love” in almost every digital soul of the WEB.
This is “Microsoft-ugly”.
Just to be sure I don’t forget:
The whole story about the newspapers being killed by digital technology is bullshit; what we witness now is the beginning of a huge press disintermediation process, where big corporations are being pulled out from their “middleman” role, letting for a while the writers to face directly their readers. Therefore, the corporations are desperate to keep the status quo, the writers are scared they won’t get paid, the readers feel lost in this new digital ocean. We’ve seen this before and we know the cure.
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I’ve come across this smart post, by Bradford Cross (via SmokingApples).
Unfortunately, the title is just a high-jacker (“Why the iPad is Destroying the Future of Journalism”), as far as the only guilt iPad may be hold responsible for, is:
The iPad is a delightful device, but it can’t salvage the existing model for journalism.
Let’s get over it, anyway, and consider the arguments.
To cut the long story short, the issue described by Bradford is like this: hot digital startups, like Wired, dropped from 100.000 iPad dedicated copies distributed in June to 22.000 copies in late 2010. Digital newspapers’ customers prefer news syndication to news branded channels, while, alas, almost all news gatekeepers have already preferred the second. Unhappy end.
Bradford shows there are 3 main vectors a news should have:
The success of search, social, and design seem to indicate that the future of news products need Google-level relevance, Facebook-level social, and Apple-level design.
Given these 3 vectors, it becomes very tricky for news moguls to find a way to make money out of “journalism”: it should either be via ads or via some kind of pay-wall / distributed payment within social friends or cross networks, tasks proven to be at least impossible.
So far so good. Though this is a bit misleading.
Here’s why:
First and foremost: it’s not the journalism that suffers from news digital syndication, but big gatekeepers. On the contrary, journalism comes closer to what it should be, having access to thousands of simultaneous opinions, from both laymen and professionals. (I’m talking now journalism and reporting.) On the other hand, the more opinions and reports you have closer to a target, the more accurate your predictions on that target’s location are. Is NYT or WIRED enough for you to pinpoint the target? I have my doubts.
Second, it’s not the truth nor the essence of a news that suffers from this transformation process (from paper to digital news) but the capital. Money is leaving (or has already left) big news and media moguls for Google’s pockets and the likes. Exactly there.
Third, the relevance of the news content is no longer the gatekeeper’s concern, but ad serving company’s. Finding subject-relevant news will be like looking for the biggest star in the sky with your own eyes; if Google puts a specific profile-relevant content right before these eyes, that’d be relevant enough for the most of the readers.
Fourth: for journalists and authors to make money out of their work, we simply need to follow Google’s strategy: smallest money from biggest groups. Facebook, Twitter and others are already offering these groups. Make the title and the first 5 lines free, then charge a tenth of a cent for each opened article from each user. Collect money and analytics straight from Facebook, Twitter etc and pay the most read authors.
Have the political parties and companies directly and officially pay their writers. They have already been doing this for such a long time, anyway.
In the end, stop fooling around, it’s not the authors to be in peril, but the news corporations! It’s not a company that’s paying the writers, but the readers ! And sleepwalking backwards into your own future while ranting against it, well, it just isn’t it.
http://mashable.com/2010/06/08/social-network-stats/
Is this a company success or just a small change in trends?
I’d say the second, as Google search becomes more of a “simple search”, while Facebook socialization more of a cool-farming-chatting web-based option.
