Posts about hyperpersonal news stream

Google’s Buzz(machine)

February 9, 2010 by Jeff Jarvis
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I still need more time to get my head around Google Buzz, which will enable users to post and share updates, links, photos, videos with the world or with friends tied to geography via the web, mobile apps, and voice. Buzz also promises to prioritize the “buzzes” we get. I think this could be the beginning of some big things:

* The hyperpersonal news stream, which Marissa Mayer has been talking about. The key value here is not just aggregating our streams but prioritizing them by listening to signals that unlock relevance. Those are the buzzwords Bradley Horowitz et al used in the Google presentation of Buzz. This is an attempt to attack with Clay Shirky variously calls filter failure and algorithmic authority. It also has big business implications: the more relevant Google can get with advertising (or some new version of it).

* The annotated world will attach data to locations, data that Google will, in turn, help organize. Buzz will intuit and confirm our location (even guessing what business we might be buzzing from in a given building) so we can post about places; it will display posts about those places; this will make Google’s Place Pages and, of course, maps richer; it will yield more local advertising opportunities.

* Local is clearly a big Google priority. Newspapers, Yellow Pages, local media, and perhaps even craigslist better watch out. Google is gunning to organize our areas and with that comes an incredible flood of advertising opportunity.

* Personalization is key to this: relevance in your feed; publishing to your friends (even understanding who your friends are). I think this portends the end of the universal search and thus of search-engine optimization (there’ll be no way to calculate how high a result rises when everyone’s results are different).

* Voice is rising in importance: You an post a buzz using only voice from your mobile device (read: while driving). This is one reason why Google has been working (through Goog411) to get better and better at voice recognition. Will the keyboard become less important? Will we post more when all we have to do is talk? Will Google then have more to organize for us?

* Social. Google has tried to attack social before and failed. Microsoftlike, it’s trying again. I am disappointed that its interface with Twitter, for example, is only one-way: I can bring Twitter into Buzz but not use Buzz to publish to Twitter. Silly. I’ve long said that the winner in social is not a site; the internet is our social network. The winner will be the company that helps us organize that. To do that, it must be open to all input and output. That’s where we should be looking with Google and Facebook. In that sense, Twitter is ahead of both of them.

* Live. When I first published this post, I left out live. Silly me. Twitter snuck up on Google as on all of us. Google has not been good at live. It needs content to ferment like wine and cheese with our clicks and links telling Google about relevance and authority. Now Google is trying to get live with our updates.

I’ve said since my book came out that there are three wars Google has not yet won: local, live, and social. Well, we see Buzz on those battlefields.

This could be big. Or Buzz could be the next Orkut or SideWiki (read: fizzle). Who knows? But in Buzz, I see Google trying to do attack profound opportunities. Now if I can just use the damned thing.

The temporary web

November 4, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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I’m fretting about forgetting things, not just because I’m getting older (on top of middle-aged surgery and its inconveniences and a dicky ticker I now have sciatica; I am a parody of age). I’m fretting about us all forgetting things because we’re using Twitter.

Twitter is temporary. Streams are fleeting. If the future of the web after the page and the site and SEO is streams – and I believe at least part of it will be – then we risk losing information, ideas, and the permanent points – the permalinks – around which we used to coalesce. In this regard, Twitter is to web pages what web pages are to old media. Our experience of information is once again about to become fragmented and dispersed.

I talked about this shift on a recent Rebooting the News with Dave Winer and Jay Rosen (audio here; shownotes here).

My own worry is that I’m twittering more and blogging less. Twitter satisfies my desire to share. That’s mostly why I blog – and that’s what makes the best blog posts, I’ve learned. I also want to store information like nuts underground; once it’s on the blog, I can find it. But when I share links on Twitter, they’ll soon disappear. I also use my blog to think through ideas and get reaction; Twitter’s flawed at that – well, I guess Einstein could have tweeted his theory of relativity but many ideas and discussions are too big for the form – yet I now use Twitter to do that now more than this blog.

It’s not as if I couldn’t and shouldn’t also blog about what I talk about on Twitter; tweets can become the trial out of town, the blog Broadway (a book Hollywood). But Twitter competes for my time and attention. It is so much faster and easier. It’s good enough for most of my purposes. So the blog suffers. And I suffer. I discuss less here; I’ll lose some of you as a result and you are the value I get from blogging. I lose memory. And I lose the maypole around which we can gather.

On Rebooting the News, we also talked about what it takes to get an idea, a meme to critical mass. Blogs, I said, are better at that because they can gather attention over time. On Twitter, an idea can, of course, be spread but its half-life is that of a gnat. I’m proud of this post – The future of news is entrepreneurial – and it got retweeted for almost 24 hours, which is forever in Twitter time. Most things come and go in matters of minutes. So Dave and I were talking about getting new conventions used on Twitter but Twitter turns out not to be a great way to make that happen because ideas and conversations disappear in smoke.

Paul Gillin just asked whether soon, everything you’ve learned about SEO will be worthless. That’s because search is turning social and our search results are becoming personalized, thus we don’t all share the same search results and it becomes tougher to manage them through SEO. Put these factors together – the social stream – and relationships matter more than pages (but then, they always have).

It means nothing that I fret or worry about any of this. Change is inexorable, even – especially – in the agent of change. But it’s always important to stand back and see the implications in change and I think we’re going to need to find new ways to hold onto memories and make memes happen. That or I have to hold true to my vow to blog more.

: OH, AND… I got distracted by reading Twitter (really) and so I forgot to mention the other Twitter issue: distraction. I’m finding it much harder to stay focused on doing one thing because I now can do so many. That doesn’t mean I’ll end up thinking less for a blog post (or book), only that the stream interrupts the thing (the post, the page) in more ways.