Tuesday, August 17, 2010

A Ridiculously Good Blog Search Engine

Image representing Blogger as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBaseI have said Google does not need social envy, instead what it needs is a ridiculously good blog search engine and ridiculously good Twitter search results. (Google Does Not Need Social Envy) What would a ridiculously good blog search engine look like?

First, it can not look like the regular Google search engine. It has to be inherently a personal experience. I should not need a separate blogroll. The blog search engine should be so good at managing my blogroll, it should be that good.

Just like Gmail took the concept of email to a whole new level, the Google blog search engine should take the concept of a blogroll to a whole new level. Following blogs on Blogger is not it. Google Reader is not it. All three have to be integrated to offer a more seamless, much more beautiful of an experience.

Blogging is a social activity. Blogs are not just information. Perhaps Google should go ahead and buy Disqus and integrate it firmly into Blogger.

And there has to be an autosearch feature. The engine is constantly searching for blog posts on topics of interest to me and serving them in beautiful ways.

Good old search where you type in words into that blank box, that is so, well, Google. That is the starting point of the current Google blog search engine, and that is so bogus.
ReadWriteWeb: Google CEO Suggests You Change Your Name to Escape His Permanent Record:teenagers should be entitled to change their names upon reaching adulthood in order to separate themselves from the Google record of their youthful indiscretions ..... the dominance of search will give way to recommendation technology ..... requires a lot of targeting and artificial intelligence ..... the CEO of history's greatest privacy-killing machine.
Wall Street Journal: Google and the Search for the Future: Where once everything seemed to go the company's way, along came Apple's iPhone, launching a new wave of Web growth on a platform that largely bypassed the browser and Google's search box..... 200,000 Android smartphones were being activated daily ..... a doubling in just three months ...... coming soon is Chrome OS, which Google hopes will do in tablets and netbooks what Android is doing in smartphones, i.e., give Google a commanding share of the future and leave, in this case, Microsoft in the dust...... how to preserve Google's franchise in Web advertising, the source of almost all its profits, when "search" is outmoded..... more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type ...... "The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically" ..... "The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them." ..... "As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that's basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time." ...... the sheer impracticality of net neutrality on mobile networks where demand is likely to outstrip capacity for the foreseeable future. ..... make sure its every move is "good for consumers" and "fair" to competitors. ....... regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right ...... Schmidt awards Facebook his highest accolade, calling it a "company of consequence." ..... Google captured the search wave and shows every sign of positioning itself successfully for the mobile wave. As for the waves after that, your guess may be as good as Mr. Schmidt's.
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Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost

Facebook logoImage via WikipediaChecking in is not the starting point of your Facebook experience, and that is why Facebook is not a threat to FourSquare in the location space. If Facebook is smart, it will just help its users more closely integrate FourSquare into their Facebook experience. One thing I would like is to have the option to have a much greater control over who I share my check-ins with.

But chances are Facebook will try and offer a FourSquare substitute. I am looking at Twitter here. Facebook "learned" features from Twitter and FriendFeed. It outright bought FriendFeed. Buying FourSquare is not an option. Copying FourSquare is harder than copying Twitter.

This Is Not Happening: King Dennis

FourSquare is inherently a mobile web thing. You could add blogging features to my Gmail account, but Gmail is a different experience. You could argue Facebook has also thrived in the mobile web environment. But it started as a big screen web native. The mobile version is Facebook Lite. There is no FourSquare Lite. I have felt stupid every time I have visited the FourSquare homepage on the big screen web. It feels like sitting in a bus that is not moving.

I have no idea how Facebook will roll out location. It was inevitable that it was going to, but the details have not been obvious to me personally. It is because there is an inherent conflict in what I think Facebook should be doing in the location space, and what I suspect it might end up doing instead in that space. And so I have decided to just wait and watch.

Facebook could not have stayed away from the location space, but it has the option to do it right.

TechCrunch: As Facebook Location Looms, Has Foursquare Entered The Pantheon Of Services?: it seems highly likely the Facebook is going to take a platform approach to location. That is, they’re more likely to federate other location streams (such as Foursquare’s) while they themselves remain fairly cautious with their own location services..... Facebook likely has a deal in place with Localeze to build out a massive place database that they’ll then populate with all this data they’re federating and creating on their own.....I remember very well when it seemed like just about everything I read on the Internet said that Twitter was the dumbest service ever imagined and it would never go anywhere .....they run the risk of becoming the Friendster of location
AllThingsD: What Will Facebook Be Announcing Wednesday? Location, Location, Location!: Facebook will finally be rolling out its own geo-location offering .... a long time coming, as Facebook has noodled on how to incorporate the hot trend
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