(image) **Updated at 3 PM PST with more info about Facebook/Google negotiations…please read to the bottom…**
In today’s business climate, it’s not normal for corporations to cooperate with each other when it comes to sharing core assets. In fact, it’s rather unusual. Even when businesses do share, it’s usually for some ulterior motive, a laying of groundwork for future chess moves which insure eventual domination over the competition.
Such is the way of business, particularly at the highest and largest levels, such as those now inhabited by top Internet players.
The integration of Google+ into Google’s native search results has been at the top of Techmeme all day long. And right after I wrote my post on the subject (about four hours ago), Twitter’s general counsel picked up on it, resulting, I believe, in the most RT’s of a Searchblog post in the history of the site.
Just now I received an official statement from Twitter on the subject. I didn’t ask for it – I think it must have been sent out to a large list of press and bloggers. Here it is in full:
For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.
In the post, Google extols the virtues of incorporating results such as “your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.”
This year I tried something new with my predictions, writing deeper posts on each one. I got to six, but I underestimated how long it would take to write 1,000 or so words for each post. I’m pushing past 10,000 words for the past week, and “predictions season” is pretty much over. I think it’s about time I gave all of us a break, and just got down to some rapid fire predictions. This will be my last predictions post, and most likely the one most likely to bring down my year end grade, because I’m just going to shoot from the hip. It’s something I’ve never really done before, but that’s why I’m doing it. These are notions, hunches, itches I’ve not scratched. But what the heck, this is for the fun of it. To them:
– Google’s Chromebook will triple its marketshare by the end of the year. I can’t figure out what its marketshare is now, but it’s pretty small. Another way of putting this is Chromebook will be a success this year.
– Obama will win the 2012 election, thanks in part to the tech community rallying behind him due to issues like SOPA, visas, and free speech.
Amidst all the chaos, tragedy, and tumult that was 2011, I noticed one very clear theme: Most of us are struggling with the role corporations play in our society. The 14th Amendment (yes, the one that banished slavery) established corporations, in the US, as “persons” in the legal sense. In 2010, Citizens v. United sanctified corporations as equivalent to you and I in terms of political speech; in 2011, we began to see the impact of that decision on our political process here in the US (in short, follow the money). The freedom to “associate in corporate form,” as it is termed in portions of the Citizens decision, is one I sense all of us are not entirely certain about. Corporations are utterly undemocratic organizations, and being a part of one is often not a choice, but a necessity. Does joining a corporation mean that you must defend that corporations’ point of view and now Constitutionally-protected right to speech?
Usually, at least in practice, the answer is yes. That corporation is paying your salary, and keeping food on your family’s table. Speaking out against it would be folly. This creates a tension in society that is clearly starting to surface. We overthrew the feudal system in the 1600s, and the theocracy in the 1700s. But currently, corporations play similar roles in many of our lives, either directly or indirectly.
Certainly the Occupy Wall Street movement is one expression of this tension, but I’m not certain it will be the only one. Corporations are arguably the most powerful institutions in human history, more powerful than all but the largest governments. If that sounds silly, remember that the cash and cash equivalent hoard of the Internet Big Five – $180 billion and counting – is larger than the GDP of all but 50 countries. And that doesn’t account for leverage. The top 1000 corporations in the US are holding nearly a trillion dollars in pure cash.
Jonathan Zittrain has an important op ed up on Harvard’s site, and I hope all of you will go read it. It sums up many of the points that I hit as I write here at Searchblog, and that will enliven my next book What We Hath Wrought. Key points:
Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse…..
…in 2008, Apple announced a software development kit for the iPhone. Third-party developers would be welcome to write software for the phone, in just the way they’d done for years with Windows and Mac OS. With one epic exception: users could install software on a phone only if it was offered through Apple’s iPhone App Store. Developers were to be accredited by Apple, and then each individual app was to be vetted, at first under standards that could be inferred only through what made it through and what didn’t. For example, apps that emulated or even improved on Apple’s own apps weren’t allowed.
The Federal Trade Commission and Facebook have come to terms on consumer privacy, an issue the FTC formally raised in an eight-count complaint earlier this year. Both sides have announced the pact in their own particular way.
On Facebook’s blog, CEO Mark Zuckerberg strikes a diplomatic tone with a dash of mea culpa.
“Overall, I think we have a good history of providing transparency and control over who can see your information,” he writes. “That said, I’m the first to admit that we’ve made a bunch of mistakes. In particular, I think that a small number of high profile mistakes…have often overshadowed much of the good work we’ve done.”
(image) **Updated at 3 PM PST with more info about Facebook/Google negotiations…please read to the bottom…**
