“Google Social”: A paradox of its own

ProcessOne - Mickaël Rémond - June 02, 2011

Yesterday was a sad day for the Internet, as an open and decentralized content repository.

At the same moment, Twitter launch its follow button and Google extend its +1 button for websites. They both are attempting to catch up with Facebook success with the “like button”.

Of course, it feels ridiculous for content producers and consumers to expect to place more buttons on their pages in the hope to attract more traffic. The escalation in the battle for embedding buttons in web pages and the battle to get the users clicks is leading nowhere.

I would rather however focus on Google move, the paradox and possibly the trap it could become for the company. I have read numerous times that Google initiative in “social” area had always been a failure. Even Eric Schmidt admitted at D9 conference that he had messed up on Google Social initiative.

In my opinion, the main reason for failure is because social, as defined by today’s market, is the complete opposite of Google model and view of the online world.

“Like buttons” are replacements for the HTML links that authors used to place on their webpage to talk about topics they liked and point to relevant content. But as HTML links were purely open and available for search engine web spiders, the end result of the “like button” action is closed and proprietary. Facebook and Twitter are one of the biggest threat for Google: they are cutting Google supply of their raw material: the data to analyze, both content and relations (links).

Google reactions yesterday has been to launch its own initiative, its own “like button” to gather its own data. However, doing so Google enter the trap of the closed Internet, in which they cannot prosper.

Google’s model has been to compete on algorithm, not data. They have beaten all other search engine using the same data set than anyone could use. They hire smart scientists to produce clever mathematical solution to the world data analysis problem. Algorithm competition is their reason to exist: organizing the world data, not owning it.

Launching a “like button” is admitting that they were wrong in their core vision. Can the world be organized automatically by algorithm, from news to search ? It is an impossible equation to solve for them without deeper changes in Google’s vision. In other words, the social graph that Facebook wants to build is actually what the web is about, and should be at the heart of the open web. Copying that closed vision of the web is a mistake.

What happen today looks like Yahoo!‘s revenge (even if Yahoo! company is now out of the game): curation is the return of directories of content, with a larger number of curators and ranking depending on the proximity of the curators to yourself.

Google simply cannot win with this definition of the “social web”. If social is about building competing subsets of Internet, defined by their user base, Google will decline on search, their core business. They cannot remain the entry point on the Internet for a large number of users, because they could not be able to bring them on every place you might want to go on the web.

The solution for Google requires to change the view of the social web, not to build their own clone of social network. Google social should be about putting people at the heart of an open Internet, where companies keeps on competing on algorithms. They already have valuable tools to rely on: google reader can share publicly what you like to read, blogger to publish your thought. They can build “Google People” around them.

I think that Google should keep on producing tools to make easy to share publicly what people would like to share, from status, to picture, though and links. This should be published in a well defined and documented way that will lead to a more open web. To be frank, such standards are emerging in many initiatives (webfinger, salmon, foaf, ostatus, opensocial and many others). Google promotes or even design several of those web protocols.

However, Google +1, until it leads to publicly available data on user profile, is a move in the wrong direction for Google. Let’s hope for the Internet that their next move will open the data and bring the competition back to algorithms.

 

Credits: Photo by Blaise Alleyne

Categories: Companies  ProcessOne  

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