John Battelle's Searchblog

Last week I wrote a post in which I opined a bit about Facebook search. In it I wrote:

Facebook is way more than its newsfeed, and its search play is key to proving that value, and extending it....No doubt building Facebook search today is akin to building Google ten years ago - bigger, most likely, in terms of data, algorithmic, and platform challenges.

If only I had waited a few days, I could have pointed to Fred's piece in Wired, out this week. He profiles the ongoing feud between the King of Search, Google, and the upstart, Facebook. In his piece, he writes:

For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this "social graph" to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.

I agree that of all the contenders out there right now (including Twitter), Facebook has the most data, position, and potential to upset Google's dominance of the web. But I disagree with one premise of the piece, which is that Facebook's proprietary approach to the data it stores presents a blind spot to Google that gives Facebook a competitive edge. Fred writes:

Together, this data comprises a mammoth amount of activity, almost a second Internet. By Facebook's estimates, every month users share 4 billion pieces of information—news stories, status updates, birthday wishes, and so on. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. But anyone wanting to access that stuff must go through Facebook; the social network treats it all as proprietary data, largely shielding it from Google's crawlers. Except for the mostly cursory information that users choose to make public, what happens on Facebook's servers stays on Facebook's servers. That represents a massive and fast-growing blind spot for Google, whose long-stated goal is to "organize the world's information."

I think it's a major strategic mistake to not offer this information to Google (and anyone else that wants to crawl it.) In fact, I'd argue that the right thing to do is to make just about everything possible available to Google to crawl, then sit back and watch while Google struggles with whether or not to "organize it and make it universally available." A regular damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario, that....

For an example of what I mean, look no further than Twitter. That service makes every single tweet available as a crawlable resource. And Google certainly is crawling Twitter pages, but the key thing to watch is whether the service is surfacing "superfresh" results when the query merits it. So far, the answer is a definitive NO.

Why?

Well, perhaps I'm being cynical, but I think it's because Google doesn't want to push massive value and traffic to Twitter without a business deal in place where it gets to monetize those real time results.

Is that "organizing the world's information and making it universally available?" Well, no. At least, not yet.

By making all its information available to Google's crawlers (and fixing its terrible URL structure in the process), Facebook could shine an awfully bright light on this interesting conflict in interest.

(image) The way some folks' numbers are blowing up on Twitter, it seems to me perhaps we might create two types of Twitterati - those who have purely "earned" audience base, and those whose base has been wildly inflated due to their inclusion in Twitter's suggested users feature, which I wrote about earlier last week.

I'm not usually one to talk about this stuff, but for whatever reason, it's been bugging me. I remember when I started this site, and it started to get noticed by people whose opinion I respected. Then concentric circles of folks found out about it, and it built organically, to the point of being one of the largest blog sites focused on tech and media (that was 04-05, before I abandoned covering news and started pointing folks to Danny and Mike). That felt good - I had earned the respect of an important audience, and my numbers showed it. The same is true of Fred at A/VC, Mike at TC, and many, many others.

But that's not how it's playing out on Twitter lately. I've spoken to a number of folks whose Twitter numbers have recently skyrocketed, and they all have said the same thing - followers may have increased dramatically, but engagement - folks who reply, or click on a link in your tweet, or Direct Message you - increased only marginally. In other words, the system is creating what we used to call, in the magazine business, "junk circulation" - numbers for numbers sake, without a lot of value.

That's a game many have played, and continue to play, in our Comscore obsessed Internet world, but it never ends well. Ever.

And I don't think that is in any way good for the Twitter ecosystem.

Just my two cents.

I've spent a bit of time going back in time lately, at least as far as Twitter is concerned. In short, I created a new account, as if I had never used the service before.

Why? Well, as Twitter hits inflection, it struck me that there was something really, really important that had to happen, in terms of how the service works. As millions of new users try the service, it's crucial that they find something useful when they arrive. If they don't, well, they'll leave.

And leaving they are, if this report from Nielsen is to be believed. Widely picked up last week in the Twitterverse, the report does the math and finds that 60 percent of those who try Twitter abandon the service within a month. That means no matter how steep the inflection, Twitter will soon burn through its available fuel (new user attention) and could fail to hit escape velocity (where escape velocity = a scaled platform at the level of Facebook, Google, or Yahoo).

That got me thinking. What do new users do when they first log into a service like, say, Facebook? Why, they search, of course.

For old friends, for the names of their colleges or high schools, for any kind of social connection that might make sense of the very large universe that is Facebook.

So when Twitter integrated search last week, it was, as I said, a very big deal.

But to my mind, it's not enough.

To explain my point, let me go back to the experience I recently had of creating a new account - going back in time, so to speak, and pretending to be a newbie to Twitter. The service is very easy to sign up for (see the screen shot at left). Once you pass this screen, you can check to see if

your friends are on the service. This is a pretty standard email database lookup, and I have no idea how many folks go through it. I don't have email at any of those services (at least, none with any real contacts), so I passed. (I'd be interested in how many folks do use this service, and how many hit the button to skip this step. If it's a high percentage that use this step, I'd also be interested in what

the experience is like in terms of making Twitter more useful, but I'll have to be blind to it for

this post. I think my conclusions will be valid in any case....).

Next comes the step that I find most interesting, and in its current iteration, most frustrating. This is where the new user gets a

list of folks that Twitter suggests he or she might follow. It's a pretty random list of interesting folks, including (as I write this) John McCain, Fred Durst, Chris Anderson, Oprah, John Legend, and so on. It changes from day to day, but anyone who's ever made it onto the list reports that their followers skyrocket - sometimes by an order of magnitude.

Why? Well, turns out most newbies to Twitter simply hit "follow all" and end up with the list of twenty or so suggested Tweeters as their first set of folks they are following.

Therein lies the problem. Ah, the dinner bell is ringing, when I come back, I'll explain why, and suggest a better way. I'm sure many have already thought about this, but I never claimed to be original, just persistent. And...I really want Twitter to get

escape velocity...because every time a rocket makes it out of the Valley and into the Rest of The World, it feels like the work we all do is worth it.

(Back from Dinner). So why is following twenty or so interesting people a problem? Well, while I am sure these folks are chosen for their general interest and lively tweets (for more, see Twitter's blog post on suggested users), it turns out that it's simply not very

compelling, in the main, to watch these guys tweet. It's certainly not as addictive as finding an old friend on Facebook, for example. It's neat, but it's not going to get folks to come back, over and over again.

What *is* interesting, or could be, is watching folks tweet who you care about. Perhaps they are friends, or family, or leaders in your line of work, or entertainers you love. For whatever reason, they are *your* leaders, and finding them, at least during the sign up process, is entirely too hard.

But it doesn't have to be that way. It strikes me that a few more structured steps in the sign up process could really pay significant dividends for Twitter. Perhaps a "follow wizard" that asks a few questions, and makes suggestions based on input

from the new user. Let us drill down by category: Business:Technology:Internet, or Health:Diseases:Cancer. The ontology isn't very complicated - mapping users to it is a bit more complex, but not impossible.

And encourage folks to put in the names of their friends via search - that's magic when you find a friend who's already on Twitter, and might act as a sherpa of sorts.

There are already a lot of third party services that help users find folks worth following, but new users are never going to find them in their initial interaction with Twitter. incorporating this kind of a service into a newbie's initial experience - even if it's very, very simple - could pay huge benefits in turning around that 60% abandonment number, and soon.

In short, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and right now, Twitter's initial impression does not add enough value. But with a few tweaks, it most certainly could.

I'm a student of history. OK, maybe more like, I am a getting-older journalist following a youngish history, of companies like Apple, a company I covered in the 80s, Microsoft, (late 80s to present), AOL, Yahoo (mid 90s to present), Google (late 90s to present), Facebook (early 2000s to present), and on and on (yes, Twitter is my most recent obsession as a story).

So when I saw this tweet today, well, heck, it brought me back. To this. I first saw the Google Master Plan whiteboard when I went to Google in early 2002 to meet with Eric Schmidt. Love the idea that Twitter now has a whiteboard with its revenue plans, and prominently declared is that wonderful mandate we've all written in the corner; DO NOT ERASE!

Yes, that's a good idea. Don't erase (see my previous post on why).

PS - Google's Master plan also had a "Do Not Erase" in the top left hand corner. So did the "Don't be evil" whiteboard moniker put up across campus in the early days.

The Times runs a piece today citing a media analyst at Sanford Bernstein claiming:

...monetizing Twitter “would be difficult at best and likely unsuccessful.” People who sign up for free services tend to resent a company for trying to wring revenue from the business later. Subscription fees are out of the question, they said, and advertising-based revenues don’t seem to have yielded enough cash flow to make a Web 2.0 property viable.

I agree about one thing - building ad platforms like Tweetsense will be difficult. But nothing valuable is ever easy. Adwords was not easy. Overture was not easy. What Facebook is building is not easy. And TweetSense won't be easy.

But that's the point, isn't it? If it was easy, everyone would do it.

To be entirely clear, Twitter has at least three major potential revenue streams.

1. Tweetsense - AdWords and AdSense like platform for Twitter. This has major scale potential.

2. Branded licensing. This is stuff like Stocktwits, where Twitter could promote and perhaps gets licensing fees.

3. SMS/carriers - deals with carriers to split revenue driven by mobile tweeting.

And there are plenty more.

Analysts who write stuff like this are clearly not thinking very hard about the potential of services like Twitter, nor do they understand the appetite for risk the venture capitalists backing such ideas have. Check this quote:

"Whoever buys Twitter, they wrote, “will likely have to operate it at a loss in perpetuity, or until the next cool Web 2.0 social networking concept comes along and Twitter tweets no more.”

Utterly ridiculous on so many fronts it's hard for me to summon the energy to refute it. The idea of the tweet as the query, the idea of brands wanting to have a commercial "response" to searches (and tweets) on Twitter, these are not small ideas. The idea of real time search, conversational and social search, real time "AdWords" - these are not minor new wrinkles. They are here to stay. Twitter is a very promising service directly in the center of these trends, trends the "analysts" at Sanford Bernstein clearly do not grasp.

Just off the phone with the folks behind Aardvark, a (relatively) new service that will most likely be the talk of SXSW this week. I'll have a longer riff on the company shortly, but suffice to say, I find it fascinating. The service rides between your social network(s), search, and the web, cleverly leveraging each to provide a platform for asking and answering the kinds of questions for which traditional search usually fails: the kinds of questions you ask a friend (or a friend of a friend, the real sweet spot here).

Many things make this company worth watching, its backers, its model, and its approach. Particularly noteworthy to Searchblog readers: a large group of the founders are from Google.

More soon.

I will never forget that quote, from Alta Vista founder Louis Monier, as he bemoaned the devolution of his creation into Yet Another Portal. He was devoted to the idea that Alta Vista would do one thing - search - and do it well. But Alta Vista was instead turned into a bawdy image of Yahoo, AOL, Lycos, Excite, and all the other portals of the late 90s.

And along came Google, which by 2000 had gained a reputation as the Best Search on the Web. And Yahoo, eager to appropriate all things Best on the Web, was more than happy to give Google what Netscape had given Yahoo in the mid 90s: a font row seat to Becoming the Next Big Thing.

Oops.

This is all a throat clearing to Think Out Loud about Twitter and Facebook. (Like I've been doing anything else lately.)

The folks at Facebook are not ignorant of web history. As many of you have noticed, and I have posted about earlier, the relationship between the two companies is not exactly bidirectional. Sure, your tweets can show up as Facebook status updates. But can your Facebook status updates show up as Tweets? Nope.

Why not? Well, if you could use Facebook as an instance of Twitter, well, that would feed the Twitter ecosystem, would it not? It'd validate Twitter and drive Twitter adoption and traffic. Just like Yahoo's adoption of Google did back in 2000-2002, or Netscape's adoption of Yahoo did back in the late 1990s.

Facebook has realized it has an ambient awareness problem. And instead of cutting a partnership deal, Facebook first looked to simply buy Twitter. We've seen that movie before, a few times - Yahoo tried to buy Google before eventually buying Inktomi and Overture, for example.

Unfortunately, Twitter said thanks, but no thanks. In response (and quite quickly, to its credit), Facebook last week announced, in essence, that if it can't buy Twitter, it's going to outcompete it.

But I'm not sure that's going to work. Why?

Because Twitter is a pencil. Facebook, on the other hand, is Photoshop. There's so much you can do with it, the pencil function gets lost. It's not a primary use case. (Yet.)

Back in 1997, Yahoo was a pencil to Netscape's Photoshop. In 2000, Google was a pencil to Yahoo's Photoshop. Today, Twitter is a pencil as well.

Will history repeat itself? That, I think, is one of the more interesting questions of the year.

I'm still looking for comparative statistics to help answer that question - the relative size and growth rates of each party at the time of the deals would be really, really interesting. Any researchers out there who want to take a look with me?

I've been in journalism a long, long time. Twenty four years, to be exact. I have a pretty clear sense of how the game works, how it's changing, and how it's played. So when I read the (very) recent dustup around Eric Schmidt's quote regarding Twitter, well, I decided to take a step back and think about it a spell. Especially given my own experience on both sides of the ledger (but more on that later).

Some background: Eric was quoted widely today saying that Twitter, a service I and many others have speculated might be a fit for Google, was "a poor man's email."

That's pretty incendiary, and it fits a sometimes eagerly applied characterization of Eric, who has at times be criticized as dismissive (I reported as much in The Search back in 2005). But the more I think about it, the more I think Eric was actually speaking "as a computer scientist", which, in fact, is the preface he used before issuing the aforementioned poor man's quote.

It seems that Eric has not studied Twitter deeply, or, quite possibly, he has, and this statement was the equivalent of a studious head fake. Either way, I'm not going to jump on the band wagon and declare this incident proof of Google's arrogance. Eric went on to praise Twitter for its growth and community, and then take the view that Twitter is an interesting development worthy of notice.

Sounds like the right point of view for Google to have at this juncture. Keep paying attention...and pounce in one way or another when the time is right.

Somewhat related (insofar as quotes can be read in many different ways), I was quoted in a story about Google's Marissa Mayer in the New York Times this past Sunday. My quotes, which are spare, come late in the story, but they don't lack punch:

“She clearly has what it takes to be a great manager at Google, but I don’t know if that translates into being a great manager at Hasbro.”

and

“You get comfortable being wealthy, getting attention, living in the bubble,” Mr. Battelle said. “It will be interesting to watch at which point they declare ‘who am I?’ by their definition, not Google’s.”

Well, through a couple backchannels, I've been told those quotes are not sitting well over at Google. And I can understand why. After all, I spoke to the reporter, who I like, for nearly 45 minutes, and the conversation was boiled down to those two quotes, neither of which are particularly gushy.

That said, I think each has a point, albeit not elaborated upon in the piece. On the Hasbro quote, well, it's pretty self explanatory. I'm not sure Marissa would ever want to manage a team at Hasbro, a point that probably did not translate - tone of voice is usually not reflected within quotations. I picked Hasbro because Meg Whitman worked there, but my point was more broad: Marissa (and many others) have worked at just one place their entire career, a place that, to be blunt, is very unlike nearly any other company on earth.

Which leads me to the second quote, in which I was talking about a class of folks at Google, and not Marissa in particular. (I was in the back of a car driving to an appointment when the reporter called, and I'm not sure exactly when I said this). My point was not that executives who have been at Google a long time are out of touch (they certainly are wealthy), but rather, that at some point they will look up from their work and ask the question: Who am I outside of Google? I've watched this happen with a number of executives who were early leaders at Google, and I think it will happen with Marissa, if it's not already happening.

When you work inside a bubble, and working at Google is certainly that, an essential skill becomes being able to see outside of your own work. I worked at two fast-growing companies that lived inside bubbles, and I lost that vision - briefly - twice in my career - first at Wired, and second at the Industry Standard. When I realized I was living in something of a reality distortion field, I quickly moved outside of it, and on to the next thing. Perhaps that's not the case with Marissa, and perhaps I'm wrong about the same kinds of forces being at play at Google as have been at play at companies like Wired, Netscape, AOL, Microsoft, or even today's darlings like Twitter or Zappos.

But for the record, I don't think so.

I love my Blackberry Bold. I've had it for two months now and it's a very good phone. My only gripe is the battery life is a bit sparse, but hey, I've had Macs for years, I can live with that. But I have to say, much as I've been impressed with the Bold's speed and features, I've been equally unimpressed with the 3G network it came with.

The pitch was that the Bold's network partner - AT&T - was way faster, allowing me to do stuff like download large files, watch videos, and stream data even while on the phone. In nearly every use case I've had so far, I've found this not to be the case. Half the time, in fact, I am not even on AT&T's 3G network, but rather am kicked over to Edge, AT&T's lower bandwidth older sibling (which is actually more stable, but I digress).

Now my initial reaction to all of this was to complain about how terrible AT&T's 3G network is, but then again, that complaint is pretty uninteresting - seems everyone complains about their network, right? But a funny thing happened a couple of weeks ago. I found myself at a conference having dinner with a group of colleagues. The fellow next to me had an iPhone on the very same network as me - the AT&T 3G network (in fact, that's the only network you can get for the iPhone...a fact that makes me suspicious about what was about to happen. But I get ahead of myself....).

The dinner conversation turned to music, and we all got stuck trying to name an 80s soft rock ballad that the restaurant's rather hapless piano player was busy slaughtering. Someone across the table, who also had an iPhone, loaded up Shazam, an iPhone music app, and pegged the song on the second try (that's pretty damn cool, but not the point of this story.) Once we had the song, folks started trying to recall the lyrics (thankfully, the piano man was not singing). As the table kept guessing, the fellow next to me was busy on his iPhone. Within about ten seconds, he raised his phone up and silenced the table. There on his screen was a YouTube video of the original singer, belting out the tune.

It was a very cool search-meets-media-meets-popular-culture-meets-dinner-conversation moment, and there's a ton to be said just about that, but here's where the story gets irksome, at least to me. "Hey!" I thought to myself as the fellow next to me enjoyed the social capital of being first to find and stream the YouTube video. "I've got the cool new Bold, and I have the same 3G network! I wonder if I can do what he just did?"

The answer: A very decided no. It took so long for the video to load I finally just gave up. And no, it was not a javascript, data plan, or browser issue. It was simply speed (at least, that's how it seemed to me). Meantime, the other guy with an iPhone (Mr. Shazam) replicated my seatmate's success, streaming the same video on his iPhone within seconds.

I've tried now a few times to get YouTube videos to work, in various parts of the country, and I've come to a hypothesis: The AT&T network discriminates packets and prioritizes them for iPhones. Am I nuts here, or is something wrong with my phone?

This is a placeholder of sorts, but I have a long piece in me about the idea of "contentsense" - content on a website that reorganizes itself around your declared intent - a search refer, behavioral cookie data, etc. it's close to being a reality (some argue it's here) and it's driven by a nuanced ballet with Adsense, or its functional equivalent. The idea has been with me for a long time, but a meeting earlier this week with an entrepreneur from Holland who has worked here and abroad really drove it home, as did my earlier discussions with Demand Media. More soon...

So I write a longish post, thinking out loud, and tweet it. Then as an afterthought, I tweet that my cat was bad today, and I had to punish it. Do I spank the cat, I asked? Well, the response was pretty funny. Twitter is connected to my Facebook account, and most likley the longest comment thread ever on my "status" ensued. Within a minute, I had two status updates: One of my tweets is about the future of publishing, business, culture, the economy. Heavy shit. The other is about spanking a cat.

Which one do you think won in terms of comments and engagement? Yup. Lesson learned. When looking for traffic, spank your cat.

(And by the way, fix your permalink lameness, Facebook. It keeps you from being part of the real web).

Update: This is NOT ME spanking the cat! I mean, really. The video is hilarious, but it's a bit....twisted too.

When I saw this Mashable post, I almost spit my wine (yeah, I am drinking wine, hell, it's 8.50 pm) onto the screen. Here's the headline:

Did CNN Live Snub Twitter in Favor of Facebook?

"What the f* are we, in high school?" was my first response. Then I realized how important it is to some folks that "traditional" or "old" media like CNN validate "new" media like Facebook or Twitter.

Honestly, I don't get it.

And then again, I do get this: that absent a centered strategy, a network like CNN is going to cast its lot on any given day, or story, with whoever seems to be best suited to give it the most appeal, the most cred, and the most, well, arm candy.

And then it hit me. When it comes to the media business, we're in high school all over again. The CNNs are the jocks, and the hot apps like Facebook and Twitter are the Cute Girls.

Now, it all makes sense.

I'm just back from a few days at CES in Las Vegas. The annual Consumer Electronics Show has become a white hot core of the marketing world, certainly for technology, but also now for nearly every major brand. Consumer electronics, after all, is the medium through which brands communicate and converse with consumers. If you care about your brand, you're at the show.

This year, of course, would prove to be different. Gone was (most of) the ebullience and chest pounding; a more somber tone was prevalent, and most certainly the network of hotels, casinos, and convention centers that makes up the CES ecosystem was .... more sparse. It's clear companies had cut back travel and thousands of folks simply did not come. Everyone remarked on that - cab lines were shorter, halls and walkways between events less crowded.

But there was something else in the air, and after some reflection, I think I know what it is. I'll call it The Ground. I got the distinct sense from the marketers, developers, and publishers I spoke with that they had, in the main, found The Ground - they had been falling, out of control, for a long time, and finally, they've found themselves on the other side.

I think we all were worried that when we hit the bottom, we'd splat like a bug on a windshield. But we're realizing it's rather more like Alice or Tik Tok, falling through a long, confusing hole, and emerging, blinking, into a baffling new world. Strange, certainly, but at least there's gravity and sunlight: We can get up, dust ourselves off, and look around to see what might come next.

The world we're seeing is quite different indeed. For those in marketing, it's a world where the assumptions of the past are no longer reliable. There are strange new creatures, and odd new lands (Twitter? Facebook? Blogs?). The practices which worked for the past 50 years are crumbling. Combined with the harsh reality of a deep recession, it's clear we have our work cut out.

But here we stand, ready to do the work. That is what I sensed at CES. The journey will be difficult, there are losses still ahead, and we'll be continually be tested. We will be forced to question our assumptions and deal with situations which on their face might be challenging, or even preposterous (a Cheshire Cat? Forests of Metal?!). But we can either hide from this new reality, or embrace it as an important narrative upon which we must embark.

And at least with the people I spoke to at CES this week, it's clear they are starting to see things from the latter point of view.

This, to me, is very good news, and gives me great optimism about the future.

(This post will be part of a series I'll be writing on print, publishing and journalism. I'm not sure where it's going, but I really do want to Think Out Loud about this stuff.)

If you care about journalism, and I certainly fall into that category, then don't feel bad if you're confused. There's been no shortage of contradictory reporting about the state of reporting. Take this piece, for instance, which come to us courtesy of I Want Media:

Deloitte report claims traditional media 'more popular than online'

IWantMedia's summary of the piece, which is pretty much what most folks read (unless they really want to learn more, and click through), reads this way:

Traditional media -- print, television and radio -- remains more popular than online, according to research from business advisory firm Deloitte. Some 73% of consumers say they prefer reading print magazines even though they know they can find the same information on the Internet.

But if you do click through, you find out this is an article in the UK edition of PrintWeek (where I am certain there is no bias toward, er, print), and the findings are solely for the UK market, which is a very different publishing economy than, say, the US or Asia. (Print distribution in the UK is far cheaper than in other markets due to the abundance of urban newsstands, the abundance of choice in UK newspapers, and the abundance in appetite of UK consumers in the reading of newspapers, in particular newspapers with a very sharp political point of view. Regardless, online is already in the process of doing to the UK's print hegemony what its done to others like the US).

In other words, in no way should you form an opinion on the future of print based upon that summary in IWantMedia*. And while I do not blame IWantMedia for this, I do think is reflects an issue with how we consume news and information on the web - we depend on summaries, aggregations, and pointers, we create our own bricollage of comprehension on the fly. Every so often, we go deep into a source we've decided to trust, often one that is far more conversational (like this site is) than a traditional news outlet. The traditional print hegemony - editors, publishers, executives in the newspaper and magazine business - seem unwilling or unable to respond to this new reality in a way that can save their businesses. But I think they can.

Let's take a spin through some recent print-related news as a thought exercise. I've already done a quick overview of the End of Times piece in The Atlantic. A similar piece in Fortune has gotten a lot of pick up (all of it online, of course): Google News: CEO Eric Schmidt wishes he could rescue newspapers. Wishes, but apparently, not willing. As I've argued a few times in the past, I do think Google has both the means and the model to help the news industry, but let's set that aside and grok what Eric has to say.

In the introduction, the editors state that Schmidt and Google possess "a passionate desire to lend a hand" to the struggling industry. He mentions the various services Google has to drive traffic and revenue to online versions of newspapers, but admits those can't solve the basic economic issue - it costs too much to print and distribute the product, and the product itself is one fewer and fewer people actually want. I think there's a lesson there, but more on that in another post.

The question is then posted: What about Google buying newspapers? The answer is interesting: "The good news is we could purchase them. We have the cash. But I don't think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems. It would help solidify the ownership structure, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem in the business. Until we can answer that question we're in this uncomfortable conversation." He goes on to state: "To me this presents a real tragedy in the sense that journalism is a central part of democracy. And if it can't be funded because of these business problems, then that's a real loss in terms of voices and diversity. And I don't think bloggers make up the difference. The historic model of investigative journalists in any industry is something that is very fundamental. So the question is, what can you do about this? And a fair statement is, we're still looking for the right answer."

I don't think we're all that far from the right answer. I can tell you this,however: It won't look much like the old answer. The problem that no one seems to want to admit is the way newspapers are organized, they way they leverage their most precious assets (journalists and readers), and the way they approach their businesses in general is simply a non starter in the online space. The newspaper as an institution does not graft to the web. It doesn't. The sooner newspapers realize this, the sooner they'll start to get healthy again. As I wrote before:

I can't tell you where I heard this, but trust me, it's from a good source: Up until recently, the Chronicle had 400 journalists working at the paper. FOUR HUNDRED! When I wrote for the LA Times, I often wrote two stories a day. Is the Chronicle pumping out 800 stories a day? Is it breaking all sorts of amazing stories and being a leader in the community with those 400 journalists? Hell no! 400 reporters and what is the paper DOING with them? Not much, I'm afraid. The paper should OWN the Valley Tech story. Does it? No. It should OWN the biotech story. Does it? No. It should OWN the real estate/development story. Does it? No. It should OWN the California political story. Does it? No!

Why? Well, maybe it has THE WRONG 400 journalists working for it?! And the wrong tone/approach/structure? Just maybe?

I hate to be the one calling bullshit on an industry I love, but really, honestly, how on earth can you want to save an industry that requires hundreds of journalists to fill a paper that has about 50-100 stories a day in it, half of them wire copy taken from AP or other syndicates? The newspaper industry has a GM problem, if you get my drift. Too many expensive workers doing too little work on products not enough people actually want to buy. And minor shifts in strategy - HORROR! selling ads on the front page - are not going to right the course. I concluded:

I agree that Google and others should be more engaged in helping shore up and - GASP - evolve the fourth estate. But assuming the way to do it is to support more of the same - the approach that gave us a bloated newsroom that puts out a product fewer and fewer people want to read each year - is to ask for tenure over evolution.

And evolution is already happening - at thousands of small and large media sites on the web. In short, I am convinced that journalism will not die if and when major print based journalism outlets die. I have to run to more CES meetings but I plan to write more - a lot more - about this in the coming days/weeks.

*I should note, PrintWeek is sourced in I WantMedia's summary.

Related:

2008 Predictions
2008 How I Did
2007 Predictions

2007 How I Did
2006 Predictions
2006 How I Did
2005 Predictions
2005 How I Did
2004 Predictions
2004 How I Did

In each of the past five years I've written a predictions post - usually at year's end or by the first of January. This one is late, and I'll admit it's because I found it hard to write. The world is showing itself to be predictable in only one way: bad news begets bad news. I've spent a lot of the past two weeks, where I was ostensibly "not working," thinking about what this year will bring. And I'm not much further from where I started: this is going to be a very difficult year, for a lot of people. But I do have a fair amount of hope. I think times like this force all of us to make honest choices about what we do with our energy, our resources, and our lives. And in the end, that brings long term health to markets.

Last year I wrote my predictions as something of a narrative, and when I looked back to check how I did, I found it somewhat difficult to mark the scorecard. So this year, I'm going to try to be focused, brief, and calculable. Keep me honest, will you?

1. Macro economy: We'll see an end to the recession, taken literally, by Q4 09. In other words, the economy will begin to grow again by the end of the year, but it won't feel like we're out of the woods till next year at the earliest. That's because Q4 08 was so damn bad, Q4 09, rife as it will be with government stimulus, will look much better. But until we have another year or two to really find our footing, it's going to feel like we're treading water.

2. The online media space will be hit hard by the economic downturn in the first half, but by year's end, will have chalked up moderate gains over last year in terms of gross spend. I think it's possible that Q1 09 will be lower than Q1 08, marking the first time that has happened since 01, if I recall correctly. This will cause all sorts of consternation and hand wringing, but in the end, it won't matter. The web is where people are spending their time, the web will be where marketers spend their money.

3. Google will see search share decline significantly for the first time ever. It will also struggle to find an answer to the question of how it diversifies its revenue in 2009. Search is the ultimate harvester of demand, and Google has become search's Archer Daniels Midland - wherever a seed of demand might pop its head through the web's soil, Google is there to harvest it. The media business is more than a demand fulfillment business, and Google must learn to create demand if it's going to diversify. That means playing the brand game - a game that has long been owned by what we call "traditional media companies." With these companies in a paralyzing economic death spiral (and their new media brethren, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo, in continued strategic sclerosis), Google has a unique opportunity to become a new kind of branded media company. It will fail to do so, mainly for cultural reasons.

4. Despite #3 above, Google stock will soar in by Q3-4 of 2009, mainly because demand will pick up, and when demand picks up, it's like rain on a field of newly sown wheat. This after the stock tanks when the first half of #3, above, becomes apparent.

5. Tied to #3 above, Microsoft will gain at least five points of search share in 2009, perhaps as much as 10. This is a rather radical prediction, I know, but hear me out. I think Redmond is tired of losing in this game, and after trying nearly every trick in the book, Microsoft will start to spend real money to grow share (IE, buying distribution), while at the same time listening to the advice of thoughtful folks who want to help the company improve the product. However, search share is half the game, as we know. The second half is monetization, and Microsoft will continue to struggle here, unless it manages to buy Yahoo's search business. Which it won't, because....

6. Yahoo and AOL will merge.

7. However, in the second half of the year, Microsoft will buy its search monetization from the combined company.

8. Apple will see a significant reversal of recent fortunes. I sense this will happen for a number of reasons (yeah yeah), but I think the main one will be brand related - a brand based on being cooler than the other guy simply does not scale past a certain point. I sense Apple has hit that point.

9. Major brands will continue to struggle with the best way to interact with "social media." They will take budget reserved for media spending (IE buying banners and building out branding campaigns) and start to become publishers in their own right. This is not a new tactic (many marketers, in particular technology companies, have published magazines, for example, and many consumer brands create or co-create television series), but given the plastic and social nature of online media, many marketers will see these efforts fail, in particular when the efforts are executed in partnership with major media companies. The reason has to do with putting the cart before the horse: in order to truly succeed in conversational media, the company must itself be fluent in that conversation. A partner with tons of traffic, but who is not fluent, will not be the "translator" major brands need.

10. Agencies will increasingly see their role as that of publishers. Publishers will increasingly see their role as that of agencies. Both can win at this, but only by understanding how to truly add value to real communities - not flash crowds driven by one time events. I don't see a conflict here, long term. As opposed to simply being creators of media, media companies have realized (or will soon) that their job is to create platforms for communities to make media. Publishers are agents for communities, agencies are agents for brands. They need each other. It takes both agents to get good media made.

11. Twitter will continue its meteoric rise. This is a very hard prediction to make, because so much depends on the company's ability to execute two crucial - and exceedingly difficult - new features: The integration of search into the service, and the monetization of that integration. I think Twitter's management team (and its backers) will want to keep the service independent through 2009, both because prices are down but also because I think they want to prove something (this will not keep nearly every major web media company from trying to buy Twitter). The company has a tiger by the tail, and two really defensible assets: a passionate, committed, and growing community, on the one hand, and a valuable, growing, and meaningful database of realtime conversations on the other. Note I did *not* say they have algorithms. That will come. But the key is the community and the conversation that community is having. By the middle of 2009, the integration of Twitter's community and content will become commonplace in well-executed marketing on third party sites.

12. Facebook will do something entirely shocking and unpredictable. I am not certain what, but it won't have a "status quo" year. It might be a merger with a traditional media company, a major alliance with Google, hiring a head scratcher as CEO, or something else at that level of "WTF!?" As I think about it, it might be as simple as making Facebook Connect truly open, and changing its policies to make it drop dead easy to get data out of the service. Also, Facebook will build a Twitter competitor, but it will never leave beta and will ultimately be abandoned as not worth the time. Instead, Facebook will "friend" Twitter and the two companies will become strong partners.

13. Lucky #13 is reserved for my eternal mobile prediction: 2009 will see the year mobility becomes presumptive in every aspect of the web. By that I mean what I wrote back in 2007: "Mobile will finally be plugged into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user and a major mobile innovation - the kind that makes us all say - Jeez that was obvious - will occur. At the core of this innovation will be the concept of search"

14. Lastly, I promise, I will have sold my book and will be hard at work on it. And yes, still running FM too. I think I have a way to do both, given I wrote 15K words last year without even knowing it....

Happy New Year, Searchblog readers, and thanks for caring enough to read my musings. Here's to hard work, smart choices, and learning from our mistakes....

From the wonderful Kevin Kelly:

While we have not yet made anything as complex as a human mind, we are trying to. The question is, what would be more complex than a human mind? What would we make if we could? What would such a thing do? In the story of technological evolution – or even biological evolution – what comes after minds?

The usual response to “what comes after a human mind” is better, faster, bigger minds. The same thing only more. That is probably true – we might be able to make or evolve bigger faster minds -- but as pictured they are still minds.

A more recent response, one that I have been championing, is that what comes after minds may be a biosphere of minds, an ecological network of many minds and many types of minds – sort of like rainforest of minds – that would have its own meta-level behavior and consequences. Just as a biological rainforest processes nutrients, energy, and diversity, this system of intelligences would process problems, memories, anticipations, data and knowledge. This rainforest of minds would contain all the human minds connected to it, as well as various artificial intelligences, as well as billions of semi-smart things linked up into a sprawling ecosystem of intelligences. Vegetable intelligences, insect intelligences, primate intelligences and human intelligences and maybe superhuman intelligences, all interacting in one seething network. As in any ecosystem, different agents have different capabilities and different roles. Some would cooperate, some would compete. The whole complex would be a dynamic beast, constantly in flux.

Make you think of anything?

I'm going to review my predictions for 2008 this coming week. I just re read them. Very interesting. I'd love your thoughts. I am honored to see them as #1 in Google for "predictions 2008."

My post on the subject, while arguably arguable (yes, I know, I know, but it's better to just say it than let it stick in your craw) is up on the Looksmart Thought Leadership site (part of an FM program I am participating in). From it (this is just a portion):

I think Search is about to undergo an important evolution. It remains to be seen if this is punctuated equilibrium or a slow, constant process (it sort of feels like both), but the end result strikes me as extremely important: Very soon, we will be able to ask Search a very basic and extraordinarily important question that I can best summarize as this: What are people saying about (my query) right now?

When it first hit critical mass, it seemed Google answered this question. For the first time, you could ask a question in your native tongue, and get an answer. It felt immediate, but save for the speed with which the search results were rendered, it was not. Instead, it was archival - Google was the ultimate interface for stuff that had already been said - a while ago. When you queried Google, you got the popular wisdom - but only after it was uttered, edited into HTML format, published on the web, and then crawled and stored by Google's technology. True, that has sped up - Google indexes a lot of sites more than once a day now - but as it nears the event horizon, this approach to search won't scale.

In short, Google represents a remarkable achievement: the ability to query the static web. But it remains to be seen if it can shift into a new phase: querying the realtime web.

It's inarguable that the web is shifting into a new time axis. Blogging was the first real indication of this, but blogging, while much faster than the traditional HTML-driven web, is, in the end, still the HTML-driven web. To its credit, Technorati saw blogging as the vanguard of a shift to real time, and tried to become the first search engine for "the live web". It failed to gain critical mass, but I think the main reason was that the web was not yet "alive".

That is changing, rapidly. Yes, I'm thinking about Twitter, of course, which is quickly gaining critical mass as a conversation hub answering the question "what are you doing?" But I'm also thinking about ambient data more broadly, in particular as described by John Markoff's article (posted here). All of us are creating fountains of ambient data, from our phones, our web surfing, our offline purchasing, our interactions with tollbooths, you name it. Combine that ambient data (the imprint we leave on the digital world from our actions) with declarative data (what we proactively say we are doing right now) and you've got a major, delicious, wonderful, massive search problem, er, opportunity.

And with that search challenge comes an equally exciting monetization opportunity.

I do this too much - post something short, as a note to myself and all of you that there is way more to say, then end with "I'll say more in the next post." Then I get busy and forget about that "next post" thing, and start posting on other stuff. What I really meant was, "in my next post on this topic."

Hope that clarifies things.

OK. So what was I talking about when I wrote: "Facebook had a "malfunction" today that reset all my email notifications. All of a sudden, I am getting Facebook notifications in my email inbox about all manner of things.

A conspiracist will claim this was on purpose. I'll explain why in the next post"?

Well, as many of your comments pointed out, both on Twitter and here, one could argue that this particular malfunction really helps Facebook - I'd wager that many folks, like me, turned off nearly all our email notifications way back whenever we set up our original Facebook account (mainly due to all the stupid app spam), and that has led to some problems when it comes to dealing with upstart, competitive services like Twitter.

What do I mean by that? Well, let's focus on Twitter. Every time someone new follows me, I get an email from Twitter. It's pretty much the only way I can find out who's joining my "social graph" on Twitter, and it drives a lot of traffic back to the site (to find out who the person is, read their tweets, then wander around and see what's going on, read replies, maybe tweet a bit, etc). Facebook, on the other hand, keeps your new friends in a queue you can check in on every so often, and all the platform app spam ("You've been bitten by a Vampire!") led me and I suspect a ton of others to turn off nearly all email notifications. Even when I do get notifications in email (I only got notices when someone "friends" me), I don't usually go back to the site -I know I can deal with that in batch mode later.

In short, Facebook is not a network driven by ambient awareness, it's more batch mode driven. And I have come to this startingly obvious conclusion: Social networks driven by ambient awareness will win. And, by the way, so will search solutions that can deal with ambient awareness - AdSense ain't there (yet - more on that in later posts, but that is a big big deal).

Because Twitter is an ambiently aware network, mail from Twitter means a lot more to me than mail from Facebook. And given that folks at Facebook have been staring pretty hard at Twitter lately (a $500mm deal was lost last week), well, as I said, a conspiracy theorist might find it far too coincidental that Facebook recently reset everyone's email notifications.

Having cleaned up the platform mess and focused developers on applications that add long term value to the Facebook ecosystem (more on that here), it is certainly time for Facebook to start acting, well, more like an ambient network. That means, among many other things, communicating again in a meaningful way via email. I have found that I have not re-configued my email settings since they were reset for me, and further, I have found that the emails coming from Facebook are pretty useful - for example, I never knew, before, when someone posted on my wall, or sent me mail inside Facebook mail. Now I do.

This is another step toward Facebook doing what Mark Zuckerberg talked about in our interview at Web 2 earlier this month - pushing Facebook out of its own domain and into the web itself. The issue, however, is keeping it two way - I can make Twitter my Facebook status front end, but I can't Tweet inside my Facebook status or see Facebook responses to my Tweets inside Twitter.

Yet.

Facebook had a "malfunction" today that reset all my email notifications. All of a sudden, I am getting Facebook notifications in my email inbox about all manner of things.

A conspiracist will claim this was on purpose. I'll explain why in the next post.