The Web Lifestyle And Company Cultures

Image via CrunchBaseThese three articles below are great reads on the web lifestyle and the company cultures of Google and Facebook.

BBC: Cult Of Less: Living Out Of A Hard Drive: Chris Yurista, a Washington, DC resident who lives out of a backpack, claims digital technology has replaced the need for his home and his possessions ..... Mr Sutton sold or gave away most of his assets, apart from his iPad, Kindle, laptop and a few other items ..... a "few" articles of clothing and bed sheets for a mattress that was left in his newly rented apartment. ..... credits his external hard drives and online services like iTunes, Hulu, Flickr, Facebook, Skype and Google Maps for allowing him to lead a minimalist life. ..... the internet has replaced my need for an address ...... Yurista has taken to the streets with a backpack full of designer clothing, a laptop, an external hard drive, a small piano keyboard and a bicycle - an armful of goods that totals over $3,000 (£1,890) in value ...... spends much of his time basking in the glow emanating from his Macbook, earns a significant income at his full-time job as a travel agent and believes his new life on the digital grid is less cluttered than his old life on the physical one. ...... he no longer has to worry about dusting, organising and cleaning his possessions ...... his new intangible goods can continue to live on indefinitely with little maintenance. ...... replaced his bed with friends' couches, paper bills with online banking ...... "you never know where you will sleep". ...... And like a house fire that rips through a family's prized possessions, when someone loses their digital goods to a computer crash, they can be devastated. ...... some people have gone as far as to threaten suicide over their lost digital possessions and data. ..... He says if a complete map of our brains was uploaded to a computer and a conscious, digital replica of ourselves was created, we could, in theory, continue to live forever on a hard drive along with our MP3s and e-books.
GigaOm: The Early Facebook Employee Exodus:Employees who leave are often emboldened by their work on such an influential and widely used product, and want to start their own companies. Others are burned out. Still others feel stifled by the company’s management structure......And just last week Ruchi Sanghvi, the company’s first female engineer who wrote the blog post announcing the then-radical Facebook news feed back in 2006 (and in doing so became the target of subsequent user outrage), left as well. ....... Others are getting engaged and married (sometimes to each other) and starting to have kids. They’re far removed from the early days of Facebook Proms ...... One frustration of early employees is that they’ve had limited upward mobility as Facebook has matured. With the exception of VP of Product Chris Cox, Mark Zuckerberg’s management team consists of outside hires, a good number of them from Google. ...... receiving avid investor interest in their new projects ..... Some leave to found startups that are related to Facebook, but aren’t priorities internally ..... examples of Facebook employees leaving to work at Google and Twitter ...... Facebook has chosen a distinctive method of regenerating the young startup mojo that it may be losing in this early employee exodus: buying young startups. ..... efreshes the company’s stable of 4-year stock option vesting cycles, along with delivering a fresh dose of entrepreneurial chutzpah.
GigaOm: Google Is From Mars and Facebook Is From Venus:The search company is like graduate school, filled with big brains working on complicated problems, while the social network doesn’t think as much about the deep implications of things; it just does them......Google is more technically focused, in that staffers there “value working on hard problems, and doing them right… things are often done because they are technically hard or impressive [and] on most projects, the engineers make the calls.” ....... when projects are undertaken at the search company, “the code is usually solid, and the systems are designed for scale from the very beginning. There are many experts around and review processes set up for systems designs.” ..... engineers and technical specs rule the day at Google ..... Zuck [CEO Mark Zuckerberg] spends a lot of time looking at product mocks, and is involved pretty deeply with the site’s look and feel

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• The Early Facebook Employee Exodus (nytimes.com)
• Amid All the New Hires, a Few Early Facebook Employees Slip Out the Door (insidefacebook.com)
• Gen Y lifestyle no longer covets 'material things', only digital media that u can store on a hard drive (altreport.hipsterrunoff.com)
• Guy Who Says He Owns 84% Of Facebook Produces Another Cancelled Check To Mark Zuckerberg (webguild.org)
• Google Is From Mars and Facebook Is From Venus (gigaom.com)
• Why Facebook Would Buy Chai Labs (Liz Gannes/GigaOM) (techmeme.com)
• Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive (bbc.co.uk)
• Cult of less (bbc.co.uk)
• Three Engineers Who Made Facebook Something 500 Million People Love Just Quit (businessinsider.com)
• The Early Facebook Employee Exodus (gigaom.com)

A Ridiculously Good Blog Search Engine

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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• Social, Gaming, Email (technbiz.blogspot.com)
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• The future of search (blogs.msdn.com)
• Facebook Seeks To Build The Semantic Search Engine (allfacebook.com)
• Google Does Not Need Social Envy (technbiz.blogspot.com)

Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost

Image 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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• As Facebook Location Looms, Has Foursquare Entered The Pantheon Of Services? (techcrunch.com)