search, social and the commons
Google announced a dramatic shift to its search technology this week. It now incorporates social relationships to fine tune results based on what you’ve shared, who you know, and what they shared. It’s a great move, but hold the chorus of approval, it’s limited to G+ and any touch-points you may have with Google.
John Battelle shares a high-minded and noble response. Google’s release presents “an unwillingness of Facebook and Google to share a public commons when it comes to the intersection of search and social.” It’s “corrosive to the connective tissue of our shared culture.” No doubt, G+ enabled search may also pose some tricky antitrust concerns. But let’s not forget, Google is a company, not a public trust, and it’s questionable whether Facebook and Twitter should yearn for the commons envisioned by Battelle.
The antitrust concerns suggest G+ enabled search effectively diminishes the relevance of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. It’s not that they are irrelevant, and it’s not a malicious move. Commercial terms just haven’t been reached, so they’re not available to or prominent in the leviathan’s indexes. But there’s some fear that Google’s market power in search could shift engagement from Facebook and Twitter to Google’s G+. This is exactly what drove Twitter to declaim the announcement as anti-competitive.
But obscurity in Google is, in a sense, what Facebook and Twitter should want. They clearly operate valuable features of the internet that many have come to know and love - features and content that are a critical component of the web-experience. Selectively ducking Google’s robots does more to diminish Google’s importance as a destination for finding what’s important on the internet than consign Facebook or Twitter to obscurity.
Blind inclusion in the Google index would do more damage to Facebook and Twitter than good. The public commons that Battelle describes would be more of a Google commons. Facebook and Twitter would become just another source on the internet to be indexed, bundled through the Google search experience, and laden with AdWords and its permutations.
So why is Twitter complaining? Because it’s vulnerable. Put an @-sign next to a handle in G+, and yes, it brings up a G+ profile. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Twitter doesn’t own the convention. They merely adopted it. But it brings up so much more - the WWE site, related content, and destinations that are valuable to a user. Twitter’s weak because Google knows Twitter’s data better than they do and can place it in a broader context. Most people would never think of using Twitter search – it’s so bad.
Tim Carmody, writing for Wired Epicenter, outlines Twitter’s complaint. He shows the prominence of G+ content and, before back-pedaling to an admission that Twitter doesn’t own the @-convention, suggests the results are unjustified. But Carmody doesn’t look at the alternative - Twitter search. Search for @WWE, and the first result is a promoted tweet, having nothing to do with WWE, followed by a endless jumble of tweets, soon headed by a pale-blue box, indicating “47 new tweets.” That’s helpful.
Twitter needs to make sense of the fire-hose in the same way Google made sense of the internet. Google figured search out. Twitter needs to figure Twitter out. Why not start with Twitter search, so users can pull up the WWE profile page as a result? Organize relevant hashtags and recently or frequently shared links to outside content. Highlight prominent members of the WWE community - those who tweet about WWE or related subjects. Twitter can do it. They have the information, the interactions, and the history. And they need to figure it out before someone else does so for them - Google.
Like Battelle says, this week’s move by Google shows that we are far from establishing the commons that could link one’s experience together across the internet. But let’s not forget that more deeply incorporating Facebook and Twitter in this week’s launch would not have entailed a public commons at all. It would have entailed a Google commons – indeed, in part, an enclosure . Facebook rightly avoided it, and Twitter’s complaint is more indicative of weakness and failure to deliver anything beyond a pubsub short-messaging service. Twitter should see this as a call to change, not to complain.
