Month: January 2012

On “The Corporation,” the Film

If you read my Predictions for 2012, you’ll recall that #6 was “The Corporation” Becomes A Central Societal Question Mark.

We aren’t very far into the year, and signs of this coming true are all around. The “Occupy” movement seems to have found a central theme to its 2012 movement around overturning “the corporation as a person,” and some legislators are supporting that concept.

We’ll see if this goes anywhere, but I wanted to note, as I didn’t fairly do in my prediction post, the role that “The Corporation”  played in my thinking. I finally watched this 2003 documentary over the holidays. Its promoters still maintain an ongoing community here, and it doesn’t take long to determine that this film has a very strong, classically liberal point of view about the role corporations play in our society.

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Google+: Now Serving 90 Million. But…Where’s the Engagement Data!

Google didn’t have a great earnings call today – the company missed Wall St. estimates and the stock is getting hammered in after hours trading – it’s down 9 percent, which is serious whiplash for a major stock in one day.

But while there’s probably much to say about the earnings call – in particular whether Google’s core CPC business is starting to erode (might that be due to Facebook, Wall St. wonders?) – I’m more interested in Google’s jihad against samesaid competitor, a jihad called Google+.

And in the earnings call, Google+ was identified as one of the shining stars of the quarter.

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On The Problem of Money, Politics, and SOPA

(image) Earlier this week I ventured down to the Silicon Valley from my lair on the side of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin. Those of you who have visited Marin might understand why for me, after more than 25 years of working across the bridge in San Francisco and on planes around the world, I find it rather pleasant to just stay in my office and Think Big Thoughts whenever possible. But duty called, Jonathan Zittrain (who I’ve interviewed here) had asked me to participate in a conference he was hosting called “Ideas For A Better Internet,” and it was an honor to be asked.

Not to mention, I needed to get down to the Valley to see a few folks at Facebook (more on that in another post).

Given the conference convened on the eve of yesterday’s historic SOPA protest, the room was laden with potential energy. Groups of students presented their ideas for improving the Internet, and various luminaries pronounced on the issues of the day.

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What Might A Facebook Search Engine Look Like?

(image) Dialing in from the department of Pure Speculation…

As we all attempt to digest the implications of last week’s Google+ integration, I’ve also be thinking about Facebook’s next moves. There’s been plenty of speculation in the past that Facebook might compete with Google directly – by creating a full web search engine. After all, with the Open Graph and in particular, all those Like buttons, Facebook is getting a pretty good proxy of pages across the web, and indexing those pages in some way might prove pretty useful.

But I don’t think Facebook will create a search engine, at least not in the way we think about search today. For “traditional” web search, Facebook can lean on its partner Microsoft, which has a very good product in Bing. I find it more interesting to think about what “search problem” Facebook might solve in the future that Google simply can’t.

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Our Google+ Conundrum

I’m going to add another Saturday morning sketch to this site, and offer a caveat to you all: I’ve not bounced this idea off many folks, and the seed of it comes from a source who is unreservedly biased about all this. But I thought this worth airing out, so here you have it.

Given that Google+ results are dominating so many SERPs these days, Google is clearly leveraging its power in search to build up Google+. Unless a majority of people start turning SPYW (Search Plus Your World) off, or decide to search in a logged out way, Google has positioned Google+ as a sort of “mini Internet,” a place where you can find results for a large percentage of your queries.(My source is pretty direct about this: “Google has decided that beating Facebook is worth selling their soul.”)

But to my point. An example of samesaid is the search I did this morning for that Hitler video I posted. Here’s a screenshot of my results:

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It’s Not About Search Anymore, It’s About Deals

As in, who gets the best deal, why didn’t that deal go down, how do I get a deal, what should the deal terms be?

This is of course in the air given the whole Google+ fracas, but it’s part of a larger framework I’m thinking through and hope to write about. On the issue of “deals,” however, a little sketching out loud seems worthwhile.

Go read this piece: Facebook+Spotify: An ‘Unfair, Insider, Anti-Competitive’ Relationship…

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Hitler Is Pissed About Google+

Just saw this hilarious Hitler video. If you know the genre and have been reading about Google+, then you know everything you need to know to enjoy this.

(By the way, someone told me about this, so I searched for it on Google. And all I got was Google+ results, not the actual video, even though I searched for it by name. Therein lies the problem, Google).

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Google Responds: No,That’s Not How Facebook Deal Went Down (Oh, And I Say: The Search Paradigm Is Broken)

(image) I’ve just been sent an official response from Google to the updated version of my story posted yesterday (Compete To Death, or Cooperate to Compete?). In that story, I reported about 2009 negotiations over incorporation of Facebook data into Google search. I quoted a source familiar with the negotiations on the Facebook side, who told me  “Senior executives at Google insisted that for technical reasons all information would need to be public and available to all,” and “The only reason Facebook has a Bing integration and not a Google integration is that Bing agreed to terms for protecting user privacy that Google would not.”

I’ve now had conversations with a source familiar with Google’s side of the story, and to say the company disagrees with how Facebook characterized the negotiations is to put it mildly. I’ve also spoken to my Facebook source, who has clarified some nuance as well. To get started, here’s the official, on the record statement, from Rachel Whetstone, SVP Global Communications and Public Affairs:

“We want to set the record straight. In 2009, we were negotiating with Facebook over access to its data, as has been reported.  To claim that the we couldn’t reach an agreement because Google wanted to make private data publicly available is simply untrue.”

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