I have long been asking, however, if things needed to change.

I suggested a form of channels to sanitise the stream and keep topics contained which “Event Pages” seemed to agree with but then disappeared as quick as they appeared.

I thought that Twitter could iterate and develop the #discover tab, using it as the default view or a focal point for content discovery.

I also recently proposed the idea of buying and integrating Branch to add an additional level of conversation to the mix.

Depth

Twitter is a media darling, unbeatable for real-time discovery and breaking news, but I have personally felt that there needs to be something extra to back this up; something to let users take it to the next level and translate discovery into discussion – a way to get more in-depth.

Prior to the launch of Google+ I was of the opinion that Google suffered from having no “destination” as its primary business was all about getting you to go elsewhere and leave the Google ecosystem behind.

I wonder if Twitter is looking at a similar situation now that the stream is full of links.

I keep asking the same questions:

• is the stream enough?
• will it continue to hold the attention?
• will it be engaging enough for users?
• does the network need more?

Many wondered about the possibilities once Twitter acquired Posterous and I am still of the opinion that there is an opportunity to extend Twitter’s functionality and remit in a way that goes beyond 140 characters, away from the main stream.

But yesterday I had a realisation, a moment of clarity.

Twitter, it’s not you, it’s me.

My mindset has changed and I can no longer think in 140 characters but am I just an edge case?

When I first heard about, and then joined, Twitter back in 2006 I knew we were on the cusp of a new era of social. The service excited me in a way that MySpace and others had never been able.

For the past couple of years, however, I have been in two minds about the social/information network with my desire to see something else on the one hand whilst declaring its simplicity as its key for success.

Longevity

Having existed for over seven years with a largely unaltered recipe, history would appear to suggest that Twitter has a winning formula so why should it need to shake things up to cater to the likes of me?

Previous changes to the service have been absorbed and embraced by users as they have left core functionality largely unaffected but I keep wondering if living the simple life is enough to sustain the network in the long-term.

While I will still use Twitter it will no longer be a social priority but my concern for the network is that I can’t be the only one thinking this way.

I have long said that saved searches are isolated events and treated as second class data when they should, in fact, be an incredibly valuable means of discovery. We have the ability to save searches on networks such as Twitter and Google+ but when you consider that Google a “search first” company it is surprising that this does not feature more prominently within its social network.

Let’s consider how we connect and discover with people and content on Google+:

• when we circle someone we have a permanent connection and can choose the amount of posts from their circle to include in our stream
• when we join a community we have a permanent connection and can choose the amount of posts to include in our stream

Realistically, a community is essentially a topic based circle that is independent of its membership but wholly reliant on that membership for its content – an implicit network within the Google+ whole.

What about saved searches? What about hashtags?

Proposed on Twitter by Chris Messina back in 2007, the hashtag has become a social staple and popular means of discovery and content tracking. They were adopted on Google+ as an alternative to other potential options such as badges or labels – which already existed within the Google ecosystem – and that is testament to their ubiquity. Even Facebook is rumoured to be considering their implementation.

Machine learning

Google search relies on algorithms to rank the returned results and the introduction of social signals and search personalisation based on Google+ activity means these algorithms are more complex than ever.

In my previous post I discussed the implications of our social feeds being constructed based on behavioural algorithms – as occurs with Facebook’s EdgeRank, for example – but it would appear that Google is looking to enhance our experience with these algorithms rather than dictate it.

The new automatic hashtag feature introduced with Google+’s new look is an ideal starting point to spawn a new means of discovery; we can now click on hashtags (up to three per post) to view a card showing related posts in situ, without having to leave our place in the stream, and are also presented with related hashtags.

Google is obviously doing some good work behind the scenes with content extrapolation in order to bring us this additional information but our checks to find these extra posts are still random, isolated, manual acts.

Automation

This is a great start but such means of content discovery is an area of hugely untapped potential.

What if Twitter allowed us to follow topics instead of people and have those tweets appear in our feed? What about if Facebook allowed us to subscribe to Graph Search queries so that we could see real-time results within our News Feeds as soon as they happen?

What if we could subscribe to a hashtag on Google+ as though it were a circle so that related, topic based posts appeared in our stream that were not dependent on us following any specific individuals or joining communities?

This would be discovery based on our stated interests.

What if we took this one stage further by having posts from those related hashtags appearing in our stream every so often and Google’s algorithms learning our tastes so that those related hashtags could be tailored according to our own behaviour and consumption habits?

Now that would be truly serendipitous discovery.

This is an extended version of a Google+ post that can be found here.

Image by truk (cropped)

Apart from family and existing friends … the interest graph is actually the primary driver behind expanding the social graph – The lines are blurring.

One of the most important factors in social growth is discovery, discovery of posts and of people.

Google+ was launched on the premise of being “real world sharing for the web” – it aimed to make it easier and more natural to divide our online lives into “circles” just as we are part of different groups offline (family, friends, colleagues, etc.)

Social networks afford us multiple stages of relevance management and taking Plus as an example we have:

• Circle management
• Circle volume settings
• Community membership
• relevance by association which is discovery by similar actions, posting comments to the same thread, for example)

Control

One of the most controversial and divisive aspects of Facebook is Edgerank – the algorithm used to decide what gets displayed in our news feeds based on the relationships and interactions with our friends. Essentially, our actions are analysed and we are shown more of what we “like”.

Social networks such as Facebook and Google+ are cultures of affirmation where we only have the option to Like or +1, while this is intended to create a positive atmosphere it risks creating a closed loop where our feeds becoming more insular and focused.

When conditions exist such that we have multiple levels of relevance management do we need the social stream to be further filtered for us?

In response to user queries over strange stream behaviour, Google has confirmed that it is testing a relevance algorithm and “experimenting with ways of bringing the most relevant posts to the top.”

The issue of control has come up before.

Engagement

Relevance engines are intended to maximise engagement – if we see things we like we are more likely to interact with them – but they can remove the opportunity for in-stream serendipitous discovery.

Is affirmation an indication of future behaviour? If I like (small ‘l’) an item about Jimi Hendrix today does that mean I always want to see items about Jimi Hendrix? Even if that were the case is this a zero sum game and does exposure of related content mean that other content has to be filtered out?

The introduction of Communities to Google+ put a new slant on how we manage our engagement, consumption habits and connections; they are interest based rather than people based.

Could the addition of a relevance algorithm the main stream indicate a possible shift away from people towards interest or is it intended to supplement our normal consumption highlighting the things we might have missed?

Who does it serve? The network or the user?

Conflicts

While Google have advised that problems experienced by users were due to issues with the relevance algorithm it is clear that those users are concerned about any potential changes.

Can (or should) the interest-based discovery paradigm of Communities be forced upon the main stream? Are we able to reach a state of equilibrium between serendipitous discovery and being nudged in the right direction?

Alternatively, do we have a paradox of choice where being overwhelmed with content causes us to interact less or with fewer individuals? Could a relevance engine benefit us by filtering the stream and lessening the load?

Google+, in two different respects, suffers from having a dualistic nature:

• social network v social layer, &
• people focused stream v interest focused communities

In both cases, while there is an element of cross-over, they have their own strategies, subtleties and sensibilities. We just have to remember the reaction to Community posts being included in our personal feeds – this heavily divided user opinion forcing Google to give users a choice.

Relevance

There is concern that the intention could be to move us away from in-stream to in-community discovery but is this the network being purely reactive to usage patterns since the introduction of Communities?

The notion of relevance based on solely on stream activity is a worry to many and we should instead ask if relevance be dynamic (platform, location, time etc.) and we should definitely have the option to apply these filters or not?

Using Google+ search as an example we are able to filter by “best of” or “most recent” – that is a user choice and should be available for the stream should any relevance algorithm be retained. Facebook’s Edgerank may be divisive but we at least get a choice.

Choice

The degrees of complexity involved are immense and opinions as to how social networks should operate are as numerous as their users but two factors are paramount: choice and consistency.

We should have a choice as to what we see and where we see it and this choice should be evident wherever we are within a network.

Update: Yonatan Zunger, Google+ Chief Architect, has confirmed that no new relevance algorithm exists and that stream problems were the result of a bug. Glick’s statement about bringing relevant posts to the top most likely refers to the way Circle volumes filter content.

Images by Carnie Lewis, runran, darkuncle

Location is becoming increasingly important with “local” being vital for marketing, advertising and targeting as separate from the global, social conversation. Facebook changed the importance of location in social by killing the check-in and making location integral to everything we do so having access to crowd-sourced data from Waze will take this to another level.

Apple and Facebook

As Waze is one of the suppliers of data for Apple’s Maps application any acquisition would add a new dynamic to the relationship between Apple and Facebook; it also makes me wonder about deeper integration between the two companies.

We now have a collective of apps and services which could complement each other rather well:

• iOS,
• Facebook,
• Messaging,
• Apple Maps,
• Waze, and
• Instagram

Bringing it all together

The recent launch of Facebook Home with its ever-present “chat heads” highlighted the more closed nature of iOS but made me ponder how Apple could introduce a similar native UI (a radical departure, admittedly) and integrate Facebook messaging along with iMessage and SMS. A native solution could mean Chat Head like functionality but without the need to change third-party app permissions within the operating system.

While we’re thinking a little radically what about integrating Facebook’s Graph Search with Spotlight to add a social element to iOS search?

But, seriously…

Maps

In a previous post I suggested how Apple Maps could use shared photostreams to boost their Maps application with crowd sourced images of locations as a way of combating Google Street View in a social way. With Facebook buying Waze the potential exists for Apple and Facebook to really jump in bed together so that a range of Facebook data could be used within Apple Maps.

Forget the added layer of complexity and permissions required to enable shared public photostreams when people are already sharing pictures socially.

By combining location information and sharing permissions, geo-tagged photos from either Facebook or Instagram (or those specifically tied to a location such as a landmark) could be displayed within the Maps application. Additional context specific data from Waze could be used to display different images or information based on current circumstances using the type of crowd-sourced data already obtained by the service.

How far is too far?

It is obvious that Apple sees Facebook as a leader in the social sphere and integration of the latter into iOS has evolved over time. Apple does not do services as well as the likes of Google – hence the need to rely on the likes of Waze and Tom Tom – but how far will the company go in allowing itself to be reliant on third-party data?

iOS may never get Facebook Home but a deeper underlying integration with the social giant may be of much greater value.

Image by .reid.

Google authorship and the concept of author (or agent) rank has captured the popular imagination in a way virtually nothing else search related has been able to do.

Authorship is so easy to set up that anyone can do it but a misguided belief that authorship equates to author rank means that many feel their rankings will improve just by ensuring their rich snippets show up in search.

Author Rank

Author rank, as is widely understood, doesn’t exist yet  - as far as we know – but in a recent conversation David Amerland (search expert and author) advised that Google uses the term “author rank” internally to refer to a number of different values relating to authority via “relational extraction mapping” or the detection of semantic relationships between items: who, what, how, where.

So, author rank per se doesn’t exist (yet) but key signals which will contribute to it are already in use and being used in such a way that they emulate/pre-date an actual author rank system.

I have mentioned before that Google and Bing appear to be heading towards a similar destination but via different paths – that destination is relevance and authority.

I asked if we actually needed authorship to help establish authority as other signals can be used to determine the creator of a given piece of work.

Bing seeks to identify “people who know” using these signals and display them separate from search within the social sidebar. Google always seeks to return the most relevant links but author rank is designed to highlight significant people rather than pages as its algorithm aims to determine our search intent using semantics.

Faceless

As has been said before, with authorship, Google is trying to remove the faceless nature of the web so that we know who is responsible for content but could a combination of author rank and authorship actually go one step further?

A number of reports and anecdotal articles point to authorship having a quasi-SEO effect with enhanced click-through rates (CTR) from search results when, all else being equal, an authorship snippet is visible. A frequently quoted increase in CTR is around a third.

Previously, search results included the profile photos of those in our social circles who might have recommended an item but this was dropped as Google found they had little impact on item CTR. It is argued that there must be some truth to enhanced click-throughs for those items displaying authorship snippets or Google would no longer have them in our SERPs.

I have previously expressed the view that snippets are currently of benefit within search results but that benefit will be lost once all results display an authorship snippet. Consequently, it is not in the interests of content creators for authorship to fill our SERPs.

We know that setting up authorship is no guarantee that the associated snippet will show on any given set of results so, is this designed to ensure that they continue to have an impact?

Why do snippets have an effect on CTR?

An obvious answer is that they make specific results stand out from the rest but could it also be that snippets are introducing a perceived indication of authority?

Is this where authorship is heading? Could Google use author rank as a means of filtering search results so that only those items by the most relevant and influential authors display authorship snippets regardless of whether authorship is correctly established?

Would it make sense to transform this perceived notion of authority into an actual indication of it?

Brian Clark at CopyBlogger has already asked “What if Author Rank never happens?” but others argue that, in a sense, it already is but both sides meet in the middle on what is required to build reputation and authority.

Relevance

At its heart, author rank is a relevance engine where decisions about reputation and authority are crowd-sourced. Any implementation of such a system will be just another signal contributing to our search results but, by connecting people to pages, Google has the option of using this authority to visually influence our SERPs by filtering which results should, or should not, be accompanied by authorship snippets.

As Google is intent on bringing us the most relevant results and it is accepted that authorship snippets drive traffic, Author Rank could be a valuable tool in ensuring that searchers are directed to the most relevant results.

Images by myself and thegloaming.

While I am not a big Facebook user I am fascinated by the principles of network science so the company interests me because it displays the most obvious adherence to these principles both in structure and terminology. Networks are about people and the connections we make with those people rather than the means of that connection.

In this context Facebook Home seems a logical next step.

Mark Zuckerberg stated in his presentation that they had been trying to make Facebook a "mobile first" company. Mobile is leading the way, whether it be smartphones or tablets so it seems probable that innovations in the mobile arena will find their way to the desktop – indeed, this has been happening in some areas for a while.

Whilst currently only available on certain Android handsets, Facebook Home will be available on tablets in later iterations so it will be interesting to see how Facebook uses the extra screen real estate and then translates the experience to the browser.

Visual

The web is becoming increasingly visual and Home is the epitome of this: no chrome, no visible apps, just content. If our experience should be viewed according to people why do we need pages and layouts and menus? Just give us content and let us interact.

Based on a logical progression are we looking at the future of Facebook on the web? Are we heading for a time when the news feed is replaced by a version of cover flow? Or our time line? Perhaps both.

Coverflow is the social equivalent of sitting back and watching the world go by – a Flipboard for Facebook. And as Home was described as the best version of Facebook yet by Zuckerberg it could follow that the concepts behind it might be applied across the board, across platforms.

Content is king but relationships are key

Moving the focus from apps to people is not a surprise; the surprise is that it’s taken a social network this long to implement something like this.

Three years ago I stated that relationships are the real social currency and social networks will do everything they can to utilise those connections between individuals and brands. Basing social interactions around people rather than the mechanisms we use to connect seems natural if networks are going to mine the data we generate.

By using Home to concentrate on those relationships that are most important to us Facebook will also be able to improve the effectiveness (and perceived effectiveness) of Graph Search.

Changing landscapes

I have long been a proponent of a unified social inbox where we just deal with people irrespective of, and independent from, the means of communication.

Chatheads combines Facebook messaging and SMS just as iMessage combines texts and data messaging. Google is reportedly combining its various messaging tools into Babble (or Babel) and future iterations of Android will no doubt combine this with SMS in the same manner as Home.

Whilst Home is strictly Facebook (although further notifications are incorporated on phones built using the Facebook Home Project) it might just serve as the catalyst we need for a more unified social experience with other developers taking both functional and design cues from the social giant.

Home may be the future of Facebook but might we also see a shift such that people, rather than apps, are the global future of social?

Social networks are continually widening their scope to cover more than our just connections and status updates. As usage expands and we search for ever simpler means of achieving our online goals, how far will the networks go to become everything we need in one place?

Perhaps, more importantly, will the regulators allow them?

Back in 2010 I asked “Are social platforms the next Microsoft?” and then last year “Are social networks a threat to the internet?” meaning that their remit would expand beyond social to encompass other areas thus threatening to usurp companies already operating in those areas.

We’ve already seen the first steps:

• Facebook comments and the open graph extending out to the web
• Twitter eating into its ecosystem by adopting functionality originally offered by third-parties

Despite encroaching on other products and companies, however, these actions are still intrinsically linked to social. Google combining social with the rest of its ecosystem via the social layer started to move beyond this but Google is in the unusual position of already providing non-social services but now linking them with a social aspect. Could this be seen by some as an unfair advantage?

We have already had the case of Peoplebrowsr taking Twitter to court over what it feels is unfair loss of access to the full fire-hose so what would be the reaction of companies like PayPal, for example, if social networks cut out the need for third-party payment services?

Encroachment on the normal web by social networks is already making waves but if those networks extend their remit to other areas is there going to be sufficient ill will to cause an investigation into social practices?

From interaction to transaction

Twitter recently introduced new Twitter Card types including Product which will show info about a product and link out to it on the web. Is it a stretch to imagine that the company could implement its own e-commerce system in future allowing for direct purchase via Twitter itself – perhaps in return for a small fee for each transaction?

Give Twitter your credit card details and cut out the middle man!

A number of third-party platforms already provide for the creation of “storefronts” on Facebook but what if the social network introduced a native system?

Give Facebook your credit card details and cut out the middle man!

Just as Google has created interactive posts which can include a Buy button why couldn’t Twitter do the same thing? Currently, Google’s interactive posts take you to external pages to complete the transaction but what if social networks decided to own the whole process?

With promoted tweets advertisers are charged on the basis of interactions rather than impressions so why not implement a system to charge per direct sale? Twitter’s ad sales are said to be approaching $1 billion a year but inbuilt e-commerce could provide yet another revenue stream.

Give and take

Deep linking from the new Twitter Cards to mobile applications may be seen as the company extending an olive branch to developers by allowing them to build value but what happens when Twitter wants a piece of the resultant action?

European privacy regulators have already investigated Google over the single privacy policy so it is perhaps just a matter of time before social networks over-extend their reach and we hear calls of “monopoly” both from regulators and those services who have built a business on the back of these social platforms.

This post builds on initial thoughts over at Google+ here.

Image cropped from a Brent Moore original

Feedly have advised they are developing “Project Normandy” a clone of the Reader API and will switch to it automatically and other services such as Digg have announced plans to build their own alternative.

As soon as the new broke developers started discussing how they could replace, or even improve upon, the Reader based ecosystem and there is one obvious place where this might bear fruit.

Google Reader’s demise is a perfect opportunity for App.net to earn its stripes.

Opportunity

From the outside, App.net has become little more than a developer friendly Twitter clone where third-party apps are free to innovate but the intent was for much more – the possibilities are enormous.

What is App.net?

App.net is an ad-free, subscription-based social feed and API. App.net aims to be the backbone of the social web through infrastructure that developers can use to build applications and that members can use for meaningful interactions.

That what the about section says and Dalton Caldwell emphasised the need for a “financially sustainable realtime feed API & service” when making his initial statement of intent.

As far back as 2008 there was talk about the folly in Twitter effectively giving away its business for free so something had to change. App.net was born from frustration over Twitter’s ongoing efforts to exert greater control over its own ecosystem whilst also appearing to make choices that favoured advertisers over users.

This might have been the genesis of App.net but the vision was far wider reaching and is summed up very simply in Caldwell’s proposal:

“Realtime feed API”

A feed doesn’t just have to be a stream of status updates. In fact, the App.net API will have been wasted if it achieves little more than being a Twitter clone.

Potential

If App.net wants to fulfil its potential and actually become a social backbone rather than “just another social network” it needs to take on projects such as this and solve real problems.

The announcement yesterday that Google would be, finally, sunsetting the Google Reader service was met with disappointment, anger and confusion but with a small counterpoint of “it will force innovation”.

Some say it might even be the final nail in the RSS coffin.

The focus on Google+, both as a service and an all-encompassing social layer, is being placed firmly in the frame for Reader’s demise with Brian Shih, former Google Reader product manager, taking to Quora to give his thoughts on why this is so: social.

Ever since Google killed the social aspect of reader, because of Plus, the writing has been on the wall for the RSS reader with Shih saying:

“Ironically, I think the reason Google always wanted to pull the Reader team off to build these other social products was that the Reader team actually understood social”

Focus

The official announcement justified the move by saying “usage of Google Reader has declined” and that the continuing focus will lead to better products.

Consumption of news and blogs via RSS has declined partly because of a shift towards social news and, for Google Reader specifically, because of that very move by Google: hamstringing their own product in order to migrate people’s social activity to Plus.

The decision to streamline services into a cohesive structure and improve the user experience is welcomed but what hasn’t happened yet in a number of cases is any move to integrate certain obvious products with Google+.

Blogger has always been an obvious target for integration followed very closely by Reader.

Saving Private RSS

Equally as ironic as social killing Reader, it could also be its saviour – Google+ in particular.

The recent Google+ profile redesign gives us more control over how our information is viewed and compartmentalised. As well as our “links” and “contributor to” sections why not have an option for RSS feeds both for Profiles and Pages?

Any RSS feeds we own could be published on our profile and, when circled, our feed items could automatically be placed into smart “Feeds” Circles displaying just those items from all the authors we follow as a river of news.

Why stop there?

Why not then give us the ability to categorise feeds just as we can create categories for posts within Communities? An RSS “Circle” could then become an amalgam of the best of both Circles and Communities. Could we then even stretch to allowing others to follow our curated RSS streams?

The emphasis is on getting as much data into Google+ as possible in order to generate a wealth of social signals; while Google has resisted adding the ability to auto-post, the social sharing of content from those authors we explicitly follow would be prime example of the good use of such behaviour.

Integrating elements of the technology behind managing RSS feeds, which currently exist in Reader, into Google+ and providing a much easier and more consistent means to re-sharing the content to our Circles fits with the apparent aims and simplifies the processes involved for the end-user.

Confused

Whilst I completely support Google’s move to amalgamate services and combine our data to provide a more valuable, streamlined experience the methods employed sometimes seem haphazard and confused.

Integrating RSS feeds into Google+ would not only serve to continue the rich tradition built with Google Reader (thus appeasing current users) but also expose additional users to consuming news via RSS feeds (without, perhaps, even realising it) and meet Google’s goals of sharing more data to the social product.

Update

Further discussion on this topic has suggested that Google could/should consider integrating its other news reading application Currents which might easily fit with the more visual direction Google+ is taking.

For over a year, talk of Google Author Rank (based on the search giant’s Agent Rank patent) has been fueling speculation of how it might operate and affect search rankings for content authors.

As quoted by AJ Kohn in the seminal article “Author Rank“, the patent sets out that:

“The identity of individual agents responsible for content can be used to influence search ratings.”

Identifying authors and then associating them with their content (Authorship) is just half the story, however, but many continue to think that Author Rank and Authorship are interchangeable, assuming that setting up Authorship will improve their ranking in search results.

Expertise

The key concept behind Author Rank is that people will be associated with, and ranked on, given topics based on their knowledge or expertise. Ranking involves building reputation and trust using, amongst other things, a combination of peer review, links and citations. Again, from the patent we have:

“an agent should have a higher reputational score … if the content signed by the agent is frequently referenced by other agents or content”

Not all links are equal as the patent goes on to say that links from those with a higher reputational score will carry greater significance – it is, therefore in the interests of authors to gain the attention of recognised experts in any given field whilst those experts will, obviously, get a high ranking themselves.

Rather than relying on Page Rank content will be linked to the author, anywhere on the web, using a “digital passport” – using an online identity such as a Google+ profile is such a passport: a way of reliably connecting people to their material.

But do we need Authorship?

Google and Bing have different strategies when it comes to providing social data within search results; the former feels that consumers benefit from having their results tailored using social signals whereas the latter presents social data separately from the normal blue links results enabling users to more easily distinguish (and ignore) those social signals.

By creating this distinction between search and social is Bing able to bypass the Authorship stage and dive straight in to Author Rank?

As social results are not included within the main search results there is less of a need to establish an explicit authorship structure to identify authors in a sea of links. Instead, relevant news authors are listed as “People Who Know” in the social sidebar (in a manner not too dissimilar to Google’s Knowledge Graph information) implying that these authors – and, consequently, the links listed – are knowledgeable, relevant and topical.

Indeed, on Bing Blogs the addition of news authors was introduced in a post with the following:

“Behind every article is a journalist, writer or author who has worked hard to research and report on a story. These professionals are experts in their fields, sharing the latest news, developing events and information out with the greater world.”

This sounds very similar to Google’s plans with Bing’s sources stated as including “friends you know and experts and enthusiasts you may or may not be familiar with” who frequently write articles related to the search query.

Bing is utilising its partnerships with Facebook and Twitter in conjunction with standard ranking signals to provide extra information from authors who already appear to be ranked based on relevance. The roll-out of Facebook’s Graph Search, including the addition of Open Graph data, coupled with an effort from Twitter to make content more discoverable may serve to give Bing even stronger signals on which to base any ranking.

Identity not a factor

While Google is seeking to instil trust in authors by linking them back to a standard identity service (Google+) Bing is relying on a combination of authors producing consistent output and social signals to determine what we might like to see without restricting itself to any single identity scheme.

One doesn’t want to accuse Google of fiddling while Rome burns but the latest Agent Rank patent was filed almost two years ago (expanding on an original application from 2005) and is one of the most eagerly anticipated developments in search for content authors.

By taking a different approach Bing is stealing a march and potentially beating Google to the Author Rank punch?

I have said a number of times about how products and services will gravitate towards the “social norm” because of trends and customer expectations. Facebook says that the new look is following current trends for cleaner apps and a more visually appealing approach so, to call the new News Feed a Google+ clone is too short-sighted.

Conformity

Just as with individuals, products and services are influenced both by competitors and current prevailing themes; when writing about social influence recently I stated:

Normative conformity is compliance with the influence of others so that we may be liked and accepted. There is no guarantee that there will be an attitudinal shift but there will be a behavioural shift to conform with the social norms of the influencing group.

For products and services conformity means adapting to current fashions and the whims of your customers; since the rise of services such as Instagram and Pinterest the fashion has been for an increasingly visual web resulting in images and videos taking priority over the written word.

Competitors constantly influence each other – Google+ recently rolled out new profile pages with larger cover photos, for example, just as Facebook, Twitter and App.Net have all done before.

Clean and consistent

Rather than just copy Google+ (a service currently in the ascendancy) Facebook has taken a leaf from Twitter’s book in designing a simplified and unified experience. Twitter sought to make the core user experience with its network across all platforms as consistent as possible and Facebook has followed suit whilst realising that a “mobile look” is cleaner than the existing web site.

Despite redesigning both desktop and mobile versions of its service a number of times Google has not yet achieved parity between them with key functionality not being available for smartphones or tablets – the mobile versions also differ between platforms (iOS and Android) and devices (phones or tablets) giving rise to a sometimes frustrating and fractured experience.

Inevitable

In such a competitive sector as social it is inevitable that services will respond to trends and consumer demands in an attempt to maintain a high user base – frequently this means becoming more like a dominant competitor. Conforming to social norms creates a degree of homogeneity with periods of innovation being short-lived.

This time it is Facebook playing catch up, next time it will be Twitter or Google or someone else seeking to be in vogue or meet consumer demands.

Identity service

From the beginning, Google+ was always intended as an identity service but some expressed surprise when Eric Schmidt, Google Executive Chairman & former CEO, remarked that the social network aspect of Plus was simply bait for it.

When using Google+ (the social networking component) the lack of in-stream ads means it is often forgotten that Google is an information and advertising company which seeks to feed its algorithms with data by any means it can.

Google has been concentrating on building integration internally but this can only go so far; it is, therefore, unsurprising that Google should want to extend its identity service across the “normal web” with the recently announced “Google+ Sign-In” – thus taking the next big step in challenging the other large social networks.

As Danny Sullivan writes over at Marketing Land, Google’s move to roll this out isn’t entirely altruistic.

As I have said on many occasions Google’s social layer (and now, obviously, the Open Graph equivalent) allows Google to collate ever more data on our browsing habits, our likes, our shopping patterns etc. so that this can all be assimilated and provide us with the “enhanced experience” we were promised with the single privacy policy.

Google dangles the carrot of a free, integrated service encouraging us to fill the coffers with vast amounts of crowd-sourced data.

What does this amount to?

More accurate targeting so that we get:

• more relevant ads so that we are more likely to react to them, and just as importantly
• less irrelevant ads which reduces our frustration making us more likely to use Google’s services as we feel we are getting a better deal.

Larry Page (current Google CEO) has also stated that “people” will be a first level search item and that we all need to grab a profile and play the game if we want to be included in the knowledge graph.

Nothing new under the sun

We could already sign in to third-party services with our Google account so some question why a new system is required with the added complexity (and potential privacy issues) of Google+ Sign-In. Most would probably agree but we now have a true social login to connect the normal web experience back to Plus and, hopefully, encourage users to push some of their actions and data back to the social network.

As Danny says in his post, promoting the new service as a “spam free” social alternative is disingenuous as the types of data collected and shared is on a par with Facebook – the obvious target here which has actually pared back the amount of shared data. An empty boast?

Google+ uses Circles, Facebook uses lists and groups but being able to restrict the visibility is not what really matters; the fact that finally extending its social identity outside of Plus (with more than +1s) is the important issue here – an Open Graph for Google.

Google initially promoted Plus with the tag line “sharing is broken” and the elevator pitch for Google+ Sign-in is simply continuing in the same vein – it has to or it will be tantamount to admitting that the initial model wasn’t really anything new (it’s just that the term “social circles” is already in popular vernacular so sounds better than groups or lists).

Compare and contrast

As much as many hate to admit it, Facebook and Google are growing ever more alike but they are approaching the social/search singularity from different sides.

Facebook is driven by Zuckerberg’s relentless passion for connecting everyone and, while this may be a noble goal, the unfortunate reality is that the company has had to become a business in order to support that goal; it’s an “ends justify the means” approach which many don’t appreciate, don’t agree with and are unwilling to understand.

Google, however, is already a business that is now utilising social data to further those business goals even though it all began with a seemingly selfless intention to “fix search”.

Facebook introduced Graph Search to build some additional structure and utility around its mass of data but it will take time to incorporate data from the Open Graph whilst concurrently perfecting the search mechanics. Google already has the advantage of having the world’s best search engine so just needs to introduce that extra data – no simple feat but the search giant is currently in a much better position than Facebook.

But for one thing…

Adoption

Google’s big problem is that options to sign in with Facebook, Twitter and even commenting services such as Disqus, are everywhere; even if they haven’t got an account most people know what these offerings are.

Knowledge of Google+ as a social network is still limited with many failing to see why they need yet another social network so a battle is being fought on different fronts. With a recent softening of attitude by much of the tech press, however, this might not be as much of an issue as first thought.

The intense competition most specifically with Facebook could, however, be of benefit to both companies with regards to the concerns of having such integrated services.

Facebook has long been criticised for the amount of data held within its walled garden while Google is facing censure from European regulators over its all-inclusive single privacy policy. With both companies seeming to converge on a common central point it could be argued that they are no longer in such a damaging position due to loss of monopoly.

Action and reaction

When I wrote “What is Google Plus?” last May I played devil’s advocate by asking:

What if the social network is just a reactionary response to a company realising that it was becoming irrelevant in the social space and being left behind by others (e.g. Facebook) who could far better identify a user’s interests and behaviour due to holding their social graph.

Although this was partly said in jest the actions of the major web entities reflect that the web has changed and knowledge (or rather data) is power, now more than ever.

Just as Google intends for every Google user to eventually become a Google+ user so the varied data gatherers also intend for the whole web to eventually become the social web enabling more of our actions, habits and likes to be monitored, modelled and manipulated and modelled.

Both Google and Facebook are in it for the long game with only a fraction of their potential realised. Users will have their preferences and prejudices with regards to these social giants but the companies will be ultimately judged on how they use the data they collect.

Images by Google, @jbtaylor and antwerpenR

Trust comes after as we establish who to listen to within our fields of interest.

Discovery is vital and relevance will be a key “people” metric for search.

Relevance is like SEO – getting eyes on, getting traffic and ensuring people are exposed to your message; trust is the good copy which makes people stick around to hear what you’ve got to say, converting that traffic to a sale.

Trust, like reputation, must be earned but trust is truly personal. Reputations are public and can be gamed. (Tweetable)

Besides time, our trust is our most valuable commodity but we outsource it with curated lists, groups and shared circles.

Instead, we must decide how best to distribute our trust so that it is not wasted on the undeserving.

Image by thorinside

“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance” – Eric Schmidt.

When Google’s Search Plus Your World (SPYW) first launched the company was taken to task over unduly prioritising Google hosted content – probably rightly so – and had to back down a degree or two.

With Authorship tied to Google+ it seems that we are heading back in that direction so the company have to be careful or might find themselves back in the firing line of the regulators.

Putting a face to the name

As has been said before, Google is trying to remove the faceless nature of the web with Authorship. While it is currently seen as having a quasi-SEO benefit – an author’s image next to an item in a sea of blue links makes it pop out – a lot of this advantage will be lost once more “authors” sign up.

By attempting to use Authorship as a “quality” measure, we are outsourcing an element of trust: recognising that content is linked to a verified account provides an impression as to its quality.

The act of just connecting an account to content, however, is not strictly a demonstration of quality but it is a demonstration of the author’s willingness to be publicly and visibly linked to that content as if to say “I’m proud of this” or “I’m right, this is the result you want.”

Whether, on the whole, we can infer any degree of quality from this scheme remains to be seen but the implied threat within Schmidt’s statement above means that we see a fundamental shift in the way SEO operates: those that don’t sign up to Authorship being penalised rather than those that do seeing a benefit.

Branding

Trust, reputation, identity – content creators will be (and already are) relying on Authorship to help establish personal branding, but by limiting the “verified” accounts for Authorship to Google+ is too restrictive on different levels.

While we have the ability to search with or without social signals and, currently search on Plus is separate from traditional blue links, introducing greater emphasis on Google based signals could get them in more trouble with the regulators.

Monopoly

Enabling content creators to visibly connect their work to an online identity via Authorship is a fantastic idea and someone does indeed need to tackle the faceless nature of the web but maybe Google should think about opening Authorship to avoid the inevitable cries of “monopoly!”

As mentioned above, Authorship (and the concept of Author Rank) could be seen as having an implied SEO threat if you do not have a Google+ profile: no profile = poor search engine visibility, but is that really the case?

A post by Ruud Hein at Search Engine People tries to flesh out this statement by saying that a “verified online profile” doesn’t just have to mean a Google+ profile. While nothing in Schmidt’s statement precludes the use of other identity providers, the current reality is that Google+ is the only option available.

What if…

What if Authorship, and consequently its associated Google Juice, wasn’t solely reliant on a G+ profile and that other, trusted identification systems were permitted?

Should Google allow us to establish Authorship with a Twitter profile, for example? Perhaps Twitter could extend the verification process (maybe even for a small fee) to become more trusted – who we are, what we do, what is our field, etc. and this could then be relied upon by Google to establish a meaningful identity that we can hang Authorship upon.

What if academics, professors, researchers, etc. could use their EDU credentials as the basis of a trusted identity for the purposes of Authorship? How about business professionals using their LinkedIn profile?

Any web-wide system needs to be as inclusive as possible to both work and be seen as reliable or trustworthy.

tl;dr

Google should be applauded for trying to standardise, or make sense, of identity on the web so that we have a system we can trust – Authorship is such a system. However, being both a “search provider” and a “service provider” can lead to potential conflicts of interest which need to be resolved.

Images by Daniel*1977, aithom2, urbanwide, libraryman (cropped)

Gaining content influence has been the role of SEO but, regardless of how often Google re-writes the rules and modifies the algorithms, this can be gamed.

A new way is needed.

Influence measurement

For a while now, I have been saying that data hosts such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are better placed to gauge influence due to having full access to data within their own environment.

Is Google putting together the building blocks of an internal influence measurement system? By combining data compiled from different sources Google can paint an accurate picture of who we are, what we like and what we do within its ecosystem.

The combination of numerous, disparate privacy policies into the single privacy policy last year combined with the creation of Google+ as a “social glue” and an identity service gave Google an ideal starting point for looking at us rather than our content.

Consider these elements and how they all help Google paint a picture:

• Page Rank
• Authorship
• Author Rank
• Analytics, and now
• Virality

As Bill Slawski advises, a patent granted to Google in December last year details how Google could use the “content propagation likelihood” – or, how well things spread – of items (here called entities) you share, endorse, comment on etc. to determine what content could be placed before a user. According to the abstract:

A user’s content propagation likelihood is computed using weighted measures of various ways in which an entity can spread through a social network. A user’s content propagation likelihood may also be set for a given vertical (e.g., music, sports, etc.) and/or a given media type (e.g., images, videos, etc.) that pertains to the particular user.

I have said elsewhere that “virality is an extension of influence” and, considering the possible extension to topic and media type, fits with the relevance criteria I outlined in The 3 R’s of Influence.

No score

Of course, unlike influence measurement systems such as Klout and Kred, Google will not be labelling us with a score (at least not one that’s publicly visible) – instead, our “rating” will be seen in SERPs, in suggested user lists and even for alternative content views on Plus should Google ever wish to explore this avenue.

As I wrote in ‘Influence redefined‘:

We cannot rely on a single system to calculate influence for all and we also cannot rely on a single score to reflect our own influence and reputation across the whole social web; moving to service specific grading may be a viable alternative.

Google will employ any internal influence measuring system as a means to ensure that users, and their connections, continue to see the most relevant information based on all the data available across its product base.

tl;dr

Is Google building it’s own influence engine? Based on all the existing and potential elements that could be brought to bear, absolutely! What is certain, however, is that it will be unrecognisable from any existing influence measurement system if it is even visible to the end user at all.

Image by John Harwood

If there is one thing that the Graph Search launch taught me it’s the strength of the anti-Facebook sentiment in some areas.

Consume you it will

People fear Facebook and its motives leading to a deep distrust and even expressions of hate. This can be a blinding force and, as we all know, hate leads to the Dark Side.

I have said before that advances in attitudes towards the social web have been largely fueled by the risks Facebook has been willing to take even if the company does push the envelope too far at times and get things wrong.

Opting out?

Facebook has been repeatedly criticised (rightly so) for automatically opting all users in to certain features but the news that there will be no opt out of Graph Search has recently angered a section of the online community.

Why should this be?

The primary complaints about Graph Search appear to be one related to privacy and that, as the primary social currency of Facebook is likes, there will be a low quality signal.

Facebook went to great depths to show that Graph Search will not override our privacy settings and, consequently, not reveal anything we are not permitted to see – it just makes it more “seeable”. This seems to be scaring a lot of people despite them complaining that EdgeRank means their friends may actually miss many of their posts.

While users should have the option to opt in or out of Graph Search I personally fail to understand why you wouldn’t want to be included. To me, opting out of Graph Search is like saying:

“I’m going to share this with a certain audience but I don’t actually want them to see it.”

Hypocrisy

There is a growing Facebook/Google divide with staunch Facebook users claiming Google+ is not a challenger while devout Google users argue that Facebook is faceless and evil – the fact that you cannot opt out of search backs up this view.

It is worth noting, however, that you also cannot opt out of search on Google+ and – as the privacy details note – your information is actually open to a much wider audience:

“Your name and any other fields that you make public in your profile are searchable on the web and may appear in Google Search results.”

Google search, both in Plus and the more traditional blue links page – applies to your posts, as they are indexed almost immediately, and the personal information you specify. Why should it be okay for Google to do this but not Facebook?

Both companies use out personal information, habits and social graph to improve their advertising businesses so is it because Google gives at least an element of control?

Social responsibility

The Like is a throwaway act and, as such, people tend not to associate it with any potential consequences but each “social action” leaves a trail of bread crumbs that can be followed.

Graph Search makes following that trail far easier than ever before.

What if Facebook search makes users consider their actions or actually be the catalyst to ensure that their privacy settings are updated correctly? What if it encourages them to share more reservedly rather than pushing everything to public when perhaps they shouldn’t?

If search makes us all think twice about what we do before throwing Likes at everything like confetti at a wedding then this will serve to improve the intent behind our actions and, as a result, improve the reliability of signal that such a search provides.

Choices

The social web is constantly evolving with the “freaky line” shifting as people grow comfortable and live more of their lives online and in public.

Always in motion is the future.

Change is inevitable as technology and familiarity serve to alter our online habits – for better or worse.

Ultimately, we must all be responsible for our actions and the information we place online – in any forum – and make our own choices with regards to what we share with whom. The saying says “the internet never forgets” and we would be wise to heed that lesson.

Image cropped from a picture by indy_slug.

Frustrations

This post has been floating around in draft for over two years and originally came over as a bitter moan about small bloggers (read myself) finding it hard to get both the audience and recognition they deserved when crafting ideas months – sometimes even years – before one of the tech blogging powerhouses turns up to take all the credit for a similar post.

This is not that post.

While it was hard to publish such a post back then, the movement by some established names to criticise the current state of the web makes it much easier to voice frustration without seeming like a petulant child complaining when the other kids get all the toys.

The web we lost

This critical movement largely began with a post from Anil Dash entitled “The Web We Lost” detailing the rise of “social” and how it is lauded as a huge win for all. Anil’s complaint, however, is that this success came at a price with the value only really passed on to the networks rather than the citizens of the web as a whole.

The growth of social networks created data silos and API restrictions and the openness of the web decreased once money and business became increasingly important factors.

Now, it cannot be denied that the rise of mainstream social has made for a more connected world but the chief complaint is often that the quality of those connections is deteriorating as we become saturated with more information (due to the barriers of entry being removed) and the demands on our attention becoming unrealistic.

This is not a new thing.

In a 2008 post called “The social media time crisis” I wrote that connections to a group of bloggers who would regularly examine, analyse and reply to each others posts were what “online communication is all about” but that the increasing time spent consuming the deluge of small status updates was becoming overbearing.

Back in April 2011, blogger Ian M Rountree wrote “What Happened to Blog Reactions?” asking where were the “high caliber blog engagement actions” that we used to see. My response was “Is social killing conversation, or have we just found other ways to talk?” but are these other ways necessarily better for us?

Lowest possible engagement

More recently the idea of “lowest possible engagement” has come to represent much of what ails the social web: Likes, retweets, +1s – throwaway actions which have become the mainstay of our social interaction often at the expense of more meaningful responses.

Where people used to visit blogs and leave genuinely thoughtful comments or even write a response on their own blog the propensity is now to “plus one and run” at the site of the social share rather than at the original post itself.

Our self-imposed attention problems brought on by trying to follow too many people on too many social networks demand that we head for the easy solutions, the curated lists or groups, the bite size chunks of news in an attempt to consume as much in as short a time with the least effort as possible.

The focus on consumption leaves us with little or no time for reflection, response or even creation.

Back to blogging

If it was hard for a small blogger to gain audience and recognition a few years ago then, with the increasing dominance of “old media style” blogging sites, it has become exponentially harder today and the real catalyst for finally publishing (a version of) this came in the form of a post from Jon Mitchell – staff writer for ReadWrite (formerly ReadWriteWeb) entitled “How to save blogging from itself.”

Despite working for a publication which is accused of “shovel-blogging” (piling endless, mainly low quality posts in front of an audience for the revenue page views and advertising generate) criticises the move of blogging and social towards “mass media” – including his own employer:

“every single second of the day is an opportunity to mediate someone. That’s mediate as a verb meaning “to inundate with media,” in case that wasn’t clear.

Attention is scarce. Communicators and entertainers are in an arms race to spend effort and money capturing attention. If your message isn’t more useful or fun than everything else when it reaches its recipient, it was a waste of your time. So news, entertainment, marketing, all of it goes for the lowest-hanging fruit.

Welcome to the downward spiral of making shit for the Internet.“

So blogging, like engagement, is heading for the lowest common denominator of sensationalism and the irony is that Jon had to publish probably the best thing he has written in a while on his own blog in relative obscurity while soulless news is reported to the masses elsewhere.

Saving the web

The blogging companies are selling out, mirroring their struggling mainstream media owners and failing their readers but opportunities for solo bloggers to shake up the market are virtually non-existent. The so-called “6 figure bloggers” got in early and filled all the slots; you have to be extremely lucky or play the corporate game and become another slave to the pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap school of “journalism”.

If things are this hard why do we write? Because we have a passion, because we feel that we have something to say or contribute, because we want to communicate.

We may not be able to rebuild the web we lost without those holding the purse strings being brave and taking risks but how do we at least make a web where the little guy can get an audience and be recognised for their contribution?

Image by sheeerin

Twitter is due a shake-up and I maintain that the #discover tab could become the default view thus enabling the service to further engage the silent 40%. The site has been growing but whether this growth is sustainable with the status quo might be open to debate.

Something needs to change.

Twitter is not a social network, we are repeatedly told this and it is becoming increasingly true as our feed is filled with links. It is hard to have a conversation within the fragmented 140 character environment but people still do it – an enjoy it – and choose Twitter as their primary social destination.

For years I have described Twitter as a facilitator and once a spark has been ignited we should take the resultant conversation to the most appropriate forum.

Is branch that forum?

Branch, when recently opened to the public, is a conversation platform that can be used to discuss anything but its reliance on Twitter for authentication and its close association with the network (via the Obvious Corporation) raise some interesting questions.

For Twitter to continue to grow and become more powerful there need to be mechanisms in place to connect users to information they want and this includes targeting them with relevant ads. As Promoted Tweets are priced on a Cost-per-Engagement (CPE) basis Twitter needs more users interacting with those tweets to gain revenue.

I was asked if Twitter would buy Branch (ignoring whether Branch would even want to be acquired) and my initial response was no, why would they, but further thoughts on the matter present arguments both for an against.

Could Branch be an ideal way for Twitter to achieve the growth it needs? Some knee-jerk, back of a napkin logic says no for a couple of reasons:

• conversations on Branch are taking you away from the seemingly sacrosanct 140 character limit, and
• any time you create a branch you are removing people from the feed, away from those all important promoted tweets and away from the ability of onlookers to see – and potentially get involved in – the conversation.
• and what about losing the service outside of Twitter itself?

On the face of it, an acquisition of Branch would not make sense but what if the Branch functionality were to be re-purposed and redesigned so that it becomes a part of the Twitter interface and user experience? Part of the workflow.

Building conversations

For many, a key component of Branch is the browser bookmarklet which allows a user to “branch out” a single tweet to use as the basis of a curated conversation rather than trying to continue it within the confines of Twitter’s restrictions but what if these conversations could be kept inside the network?

If we work on the earlier assumption that the #discover tab (or a future iteration of it) will become the default Twitter view then could Branch-like conversations be an ideal way to get users discussing key topics?

As well as a traditional reply, normal tweet conversations could also employ this mechanism (perhaps via a built-in option to “branch this”) with a reference to the branch included within an expanded tweet; could branch become an alternative conversation view so that even multi-user conversations can be better followed and managed?

But, what of the 140 character limit?

Twitter has been keen to stick to its mobile roots so that those without smartphones, perhaps in emerging markets, or in circumstances where there is no reliable data service (such as countries where the government controls web access or during times of crisis) can tweet via text and keep their sharing their messages.

Would the service want to develop a two tier system? Perhaps we could argue features such as #discover and expanded tweets are already doing this but neither the consumption of tweets (either in the stream or on #discover) nor the use of expanded tweets preclude users from sending messages and receiving those from subscribed users via SMS.

As I have previously suggested, users would still be tweeting to their feed if not browsing the latest updates on #discover and there would be no reason to change the 140 character limit for this purpose.

Channels

Almost two years ago I first suggested that Twitter could employ a method of using“channels” to enable discussion about a particular topic in a focused stream without spamming the main feed. Last year, Twitter trialed event pages which showed a separate, curated stream for a particular event – although the tweets still remained in the public feed.

Branches could achieve a similar result by removing potentially noisy, topic based discussion from normal view but with the conversation visible to all just a click away.

Taking a risk

We have to consider if the current system is enough or whether enabling alternative functionality is essential to the continued expansion of Twitter?

Both switching to #discover as the default view and the introduction of an alternative conversation mechanism would be incredibly risky but, if introduced as options, would let users tailor their experience based on their requirements whilst allowing the purists to stick to 140 characters in the primary feed.

Branch is a natural expansion to the Twitter experience and one which could provide significant value for the network if it was brave enough to pursue it.

Search within our social networks has historically been poor, even Google+ launched without it until Google deemed it ready for public consumption.

Twitter search is still limited to a short period despite the acquisition of Summize and, as far as Facebook search goes it been a case of the less said the better.

Due to a number of privacy concerns and other issues, such as the recent fracas over the Instagram Terms of Service, Facebook has been coming in for a lot of flak – some warranted but much unjustified. Many people have decided that the just don’t trust Facebook and that’s that!

When App.net launched it promised to be “what Twitter could have been” and, with the controversy over ongoing changes to the APIs, became a hotbed of anti-Twitter sentiment. Similarly, Google+ seems to be harbouring an unhealthy dose of anti-Facebook rhetoric again much of which is unjustified.

People don’t trust Facebook.

So Facebook is asking its users to trust each other and has been building a tool which allows us to do just this.

Graph Search

As anticipated, Facebook announced a new search product which formed the third of “three pillars of Facebook” namely: the newsfeed, Timeline and, now, Graph Search.

Graph search is exactly as its name suggests: a search of the Facebook social graph allowing us to find information shared with us so far encompassing people, photos, places and interests while all relating back to the privacy settings for each piece of information. It is planned that mobile, post data and the Open Graph will be indexed in future but this will take a while to complete.

My initial reactions were that the Graph Search beta content was a promising start but that will not be fully realised until the extra data – especially from the Open Graph – is included.

Playing catch-up

Yes, Facebook is playing catch-up to Google on search but as Google is originally a search company so you would expect that.

Does Facebook have to beat Google at its own game? Absolutely not!

In order to succeed with Graph Search, Facebook has to make a system that works well for Facebook users which:

1. makes use of the connections between them
2. uses the search queries/results to improve the experience
3. is good enough to make users want to use it rather than jumping out for a web search

Graph Search v Web Search

Google is blurring the lines between a traditional web search and a search of the social graph but we still have two places we can instigate this which gives us two different sets of results (Google Search and Plus).

Google web search is a blue links list which is now personalised based on our interests, data provided from other Google products thanks to the single privacy policy and the actions of others (+1s) but it is still primarily a blue links search. For those who have not yet upgraded to Plus then it is still only a blue links resource.

Facebook does not have a blue links engine – so has to partner with Bing – but is not (yet) interested in having one. Instead, the blue giant is using the power of the networkto find stuff using recommendations and trust – Facebook is not building a search engine but a “trust engine”.

Yes, Google is also building this based on sharing and +1s but when you have two search locations returning different results from different data sets then something needs to change there as well.

Half way

Graph search appears to be pretty powerful and fast and is not limited to friends but also public information which you would expect – anything visible to us can be returned via a search. It is not designed to give us a definitive list of “plumbers in Yourtown” (as would be exposed by a web search) but instead “plumbers in Yourtown which people have used and would recommend” – it builds on the relationships we have with those we are connected to and the trust we can place in their experience.

Graph Search is half way as the data held on Facebook itself is only half the story; people will be liking pages and services across the “normal web” and taking other Open Graph actions which help to flesh out their interests, likes and opinions. Once all of this data has been indexed Facebook will really be able to flesh out the trust engine.

I have stated previously:

Facebook has no need to build a full search engine as the indexing of external content is crowd-sourced to its users with likes and frictionless sharing.

As Zuckerberg said during the announcement, he doesn’t expect people to come to Facebook just to perform a search when they are used to blue link sites and may not even be regular Facebook users. What he does hope it will be is a valuable resource for those people who are already on the site and want some information while they are there.

Admittedly, Facebook will also be able to mine that search data in order to further identify our likes and intentions which will, no doubt, increase the ability to target us more effectively with relevant advertising even if there are no plans to immediately monetise Graph Search itself.

Good enough, but when?

As with other features Facebook has included, Graph Search doesn’t have to beat the likes of Google but be just good enough to catch the majority of users and save them the need of going elsewhere.

Zuckerberg admitted that this is not something that will roll out overnight but the key will be how quickly they can release something, how reliable it is and then how long it takes to introduce Open Graph data.

With the talk of “years of work” Facebook can, however, be seen to be in it for the long haul – just like Google with Plus.

A version of this post originally appeared at Google+

Image by mtsofan

I have written before about how we might “play a role” on social networks based on what is expected of us.

Influence is normally considered as the ability to affect the thoughts, actions and ideas of others but what if those actions create a feedback loop and thus affect our own behaviour?

Inverse influence

We may seek to influence and, in this regard, are reliant on the responses of our audience to determine what is popular or where our expertise appears to lie.  Problems arise when we allow ourselves to be unduly driven by audience response.

By reacting to our audience – and placing too great an emphasis on its feedback – we are in danger of becoming the ones influenced where the actions we seek to influence may instead determine our path.

Image by Sean MacEntee (flipped)