I am going to be offline for the next few days, heading to hear the crack of the bat in Spring training with my son. Bliss. But a couple of very notable things:
– Yahoo is playing ball again. Read RWW’s summary of Yahoo’s FB Connect competitor. So good to see the company back in the game.
– Googlers leaving to start social sites. Readers of this site will not find this in any way surprising. Read this quote: In her opinion, the reason former Googlers focus on community-oriented is because they, “know that it is very difficult to take on Google on a pure technology play,” and, “when it comes to community based sites, Google doesn’t do all that well. Google’s infrastructure, most of it built in-house, makes it really difficult to iterate rapidly. Google Video, a product that I worked on comes to mind. Part of the reason Google Video failed miserably against You Tube was that the team couldn’t iterate rapidly and build some of the community and upload features as rapidly as they wanted.
Welcome to Being a Big Company, Google. A Big Company that is Not That Good At that Community (ie Human ie Media) thing…..
Hasn’t Yahoo! been somewhat bigger then Google? Haven’t they been good at “that kind of thing”?
Yes, i adhere to your think Bertil Hatt.
Google’s infrastructure, most of it built in-house, makes it really difficult to iterate rapidly.
Huh? Am I completely missing something? Didn’t Google specifically engineer their architecture, and in fact their whole company culture, around this central premise of being able to iterate rapidly? Isn’t it in their corporate culture to get something out there, see how it’s used, and quickly change it into something even better? It’s the famous Google perpetual beta.
So how is it that they went from being the masters of the perpetual beta, to driving employees away?
I have noticed that ex-Googlers tend to use “rel=’nofollow'” on their new social media sites, which may be the kiss of death for them since the experienced Web marketing community will be less likely to support such sites.
The NoFollow controversy arose out of a serious wave of abuse (link spammers flooding blogs and forums with link drops in the comments) but now Google’s misguided philosophy is leading people to blot all their outflow from crawling existence.
The increased reliance upon NoFollow on social media sites will create crawl and indexing problems for them (problems which can be managed through alternative structures but the additional effort is not justified).
Google’s house of cards (PageRank) is beginning to tremble under the mass of all the manipulations they have resorted to in their campaign to make it look like PageRank really works and helps.
Most links do not pass PageRank in Google’s index now — and NoFollow is only one of several reasons for why that is so. So ex-Googlers are going to find themselves hoist on their own petard.
Poetic justice still exists on the Web, it seems.