Ah, that's the downside of wanting to peek into the future of the web, there is too much of it.

It's long, so I'll let you cheat with bullet points:

• Social fatigue is approaching
• The web gets crowded with giants, space is lacking
• Governments and users don't really like giants
• This could be a bubble waiting to burst
• It it goes *pOp* everybody will feel it. Hard.

 

I intended to name this post Google VS Apple, but some recent reading have seriously changed the editorial line.
This month has seen a cartload of surprising announcements, with in the top 3: Google Buzz, Goggle ISP service and Facebook Mail.
Seems that right now, everybody is trying to do everything in the same time.

Here, I don't think anything is obvious or even less obvious, because it's too early. I could state something like "The web as we know it is going to change drastically, and it's happening now" But that's even beyond the obvious.

Now, what's interesting

1) Aggregation VS Deggregation, social fatigue

I've been browsing my way since before 2000. No boasting here. Just to say that I remember something, look:

• At the beginning was a panel of various sites, later cross advertising in rings and clubs. I call that Deggregation, where you centralise the information without actually having one single info pool. It works just like the Internet.
• Later on, came Friendster and the likes, with myriads of sharing tools centralizing the data to several disting pools, that's aggregation.
• Deggregation came again, with the blogging phenomenon. Everyone had one, and crosse advertized with his friends
• Aggreggation again through Facebook and the Web 2.0 as we know it.

Do you see a pattern?
When users get tired to have nothing left for themselves, they may turn back to services that allow them to just be. When they will be tired of depending on one or two platforms that communicate with a multitude of services to disseminate their data, they may just chose one. Or none.
Me? I am tired of hearing Google, Facebook, Yahoo and the likes screaming in both my ears "Give me your photos, let me be your host, please pleaaase, I'm so much better than the other one".

2) Panorama

Sorry, I'm going to bother you with stupid graphs, but with some luck they are clear enough.

Here is what a part of the web looked like in the end of 2009:

 

And here is a picture of how it has evolved until today:

 

Now we are talking. Everybody wants to do everything at once.

Twitter? They play in their corner, patiently waiting to be bought by someone.

3) Bubble Bursting Golems

What about my data, what do I have to do now, where do I need to go If I want to do...well..anything??
The way data are uploaded now reminds me of a parking lot where I would need to park my wheels, body and engine in different places, and need paperwork to reassemble it once I want to go out.

And oh, do you see the bubble growing? The multitude of services being created around these actors? See how bubbles tend to burst?

Why should they burst? Because of what I call the Golem complex. For a better understanding of the thing, look at this third annoying graph:

Now, do you like what you see? I don't.

Google is going horizontal, and godspeed, clearly targeting all possible ways of communication
Facebook, which has a much larger user base than GMail, is doing the same, at a much quieter pace, understanding that their mobile presence is enough.
Apple is still ruling the Real World, strong of its all time experience in hardware.

Facebook and Google have become mega-structures, (human created Golems) and they are expending everyday. Now, who isn't afraid of one enormous entity ruling over the world of communications? That's what I call the Golem Complex. And it could be rule changing when users get finally scared enough to find something better. Who said Iran, who said China?

4) The role of The Enablers (the needle to poke the bubble)

I see three enablers here: Microsoft, Yahoo and The Censors.

Microsoft has the technology, all their money comes from OS, software and servers. The rest seems to be just for fun. Yahoo, has the technology, their chat protocol has become a standard.
Both have a tremendous user base, but by staying away from the SNS battle (or just sucking at it) they are giving way to the others. Worse, they form alliances (Microsoft and Facebook for adds Yahoo! streams to Twitter and YouTube-Google- and so on and so forth). They let Facebook and Google do their thing, go monopolistic and scare the hell out the FCC.

The Censors are all the copyright freaks from the music/movies/books industry, waging a sore war on the Bad Usaaars, and lobbying governments to filter the web and enforce THEIR laws (France, soon Spain, let's pray it doesn't get global). They let the users get disgusted of what the internet is becoming, scared for their privacy and if it spreads, one day massively move for services that doesn't collaborate with the NSA. Yes Google seem to do it.

5) A business based on thin air

Well, won't get too expensive on this. The billions of dollars generated by online advertising are based on thin air. Microsoft sells goods, so does Apple, they can fail at other things.
Google or Facebook... will drag start-ups and third parties on a landslide of bankcrupcy if users stop using them. Oh, and yes, the online add business is declining, but no body seems to care.

6) So, how does it burst?

Lets see

• We are near the apex of an aggregation trend
• Users might get tired of too many entry points to share their content
• Major actors are getting too big to be trusted
• Goverments are getting pissed off
• Online advertisement might collapse, and will of Google or Facebook commits to big a mistake
• *pOp*

But yeah... I could be wrong. Man I hope so. Wait and see.

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So, MrG, we are going social?

I've waited until the middle of the night to see the announcement on TechCrunch.
I was excited. I was excited because it's been quite a while that I've been thinking they would make their move (see here, here and here if you feel unproductive today).

I'm just done reading the TC entry, and I don't really know what to think. Yesterday there was a surprise announcement, and I learned from @Scobleizer that the product was developed in house, unlike Wave. I was waiting for something differentiated, outside Google core functions, and here is another GoogleSomething.

Bullets because long:

• Integration to Gmail is not the smartest move, not everybody wants SNS and e-mail merged.
• The timing is pretty bad, Google is late and doesn't really do anything new here
• Their product lacks of differentiation, just another GoogleThingy?
• Gmail huge user base is not that huge, actually and their traffic is flat compared to FB or twitter
• Greed is good when the timing and alliances are good. Not the case here.
• I say, ouch.

There are some reasons I'm left a bit skeptical about the Buzz.

1) It's integrated to GMail

Here is something I don't really like. I chose GMail for it's simplicity/geekishness when I started to use it, and I don't have any lab extension. I like my mailbox to be my mailbox, and most of all I don't want to worry about who will get what update.
I don't want to mix my Web-Social persona with a mailbox I use to keep in touch with professional contacts, or people I need to talk to every now and then but I'm not really friend with.
I don't want my social platform to be supported by the box that receives the Ch34p V14gR4 spam.

Another thing, I quote TC:

People certainly haven’t started using Yahoo Mail just because it added social features.

Big G sees social features as a natural evolution to the e-mail; I am not sure everybody share their point of view. It might be true, up to a point, for a new generation of users introduced to the web by Facebook and others of the kinds, but for a huge base of older users, it's not that obvious.

2) It's a bad timing for a product that deggregates.

Yeah they are late. As I stated earlier here, alliances are likely to happen, and yes they are happening already. Last year Microsoft/Facebook, now Yahoo!/Facebook...
More are to come, and they will facilitate the aggregation of content. It's now pretty obvious that at one moment, probably this year, the SNS bubble will noiselessly implode, the social graph being pruned of a myriad of lesser services, users will refocus on the mainstream giants. These giants know it, and their are securing their position.

Google Buzz, on the contrary, frontally attacks Facebook by not announcing any cooperation on the long run. Google thinks that the huge GMail user base will make the difference? It will just create another entry point. Over the 150 millions users of GMail, who's also got a Facebook, Twitter account, or both? Who will be ready to migrate?

Facebook is now preparing an email service with Vanity URLs. User will be confused soon. I ask myself: will I email from my SNS or SNS from my email. Personally... neither.

There are ways to deggregate content that works, Facebook/Yahoo!/Google Friend connect are the proofs. But their approach is totally different from just creating another source of sharing.

3) Just another Google product, welcome to the bloat.

Same as Apple, with their iThingies, lots and lots of GoogleThingies are around. But where Apple produces clearly differenciated content/products, G wants to be the one stop shop. The consequences? I see just another product integrated to the suite. A less open one for starters. Remember Firefox when it started? Remember Chrome (browser)? Don't we all like it when it's simple?

4) The bleeding statistics

Here is the graph from quantcast.com :

Yes, the flat-liner is GMail.

5) Conclusions

You can draw your own conclusions. Mine is that Google wants too much, too fast and is getting greedy about its traffic. There is a reason for that, an increasing amount of experts are seeing the traditional web-add market plummeting (here and here) , and if Google wants to keep on selling ...well...us, to advertisers, it has to find a new way of doing it. Only it's pretty late to enter the race, and they've been ignoring the social aspect of the web for too long. I see a long long battle here.

Buzz might change it. Or might not.

But then again, I might be wrong...wait and see.

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I don't know if I can make it really long or informative, It's my 30th hour without sleep...
But...

There is a debate going on, I'm tempted to say lately, but it's been several years now, and I feel it's just surfacing. Behold Print Media Vs Digital Media!

What made me want to write this post is this article on eff.org, which makes great sense and can be summed up in just one quote:

Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book

For reference, there is my old rant about the Amazon Kindle where I explain why the device is bad, why it spies on you and why it robs you from your rights as a reader and as a consumer.

To my mind it goes even further than that. First off, print and digital media are fighting a battle that will only leave losers, it's already happening by the way, with Google attempting to limit the access to free news. Then, print media are so scared to lose their precious advertisers that they try competing on the long lost ground of the instant info.Digital media, on the other end, are brawling about content producing and space filling, and end up publishing top10s after top10s.

The truth is, now it's begun, we need digital media, as much as the audience crave for information. Everything moves fast, everybody reacts fast, the Holy Buzz travels faster than physically possible, and we need to keep track of that. Why, because information is togetherness, is community, is social acknowledgment, and us humans need it, it's in out genes.

The truth is, we still need print media. So much for the trees, I know, but we need print media. One reason is that trends and moods need time to form, situations are not formed instantly but are the result of a process of thoughts and actions, and, well, you know, you analyze the game after it's over... during the game, you comment it. Print media are good at that, they can afford to take more time, to investigate the topic and to spare us the effort of analysis, giving the prerogative to people who, more often than not it you read Time or Newsweek, know what they are writing about.

Yet there is another reason.

Have you tried to read a floppy disk recently? That's what I'm talking about. Now we are comfortable with our hard disks and pen drives, and trans-flash and... and all the information, petabytes of data, is totally unreadable without the proper material... Soon will be time for the Qubit and quantum computing, and our current storage systems will be obsolete.
I can read my grandmother's diary. I can read a 200 years old book.
I cannot read a 20 years old floppy. Even if my whole genealogy is in it, I can't access it.

I'm perplex about all that. Information can't be kept in, now less than ever, especially for a mercantile purpose. But it's raw information we are talking about, and a good analysis over this info is priceless and deserves a durable, non versatile medium.

Sooner or later, "they" will probably realize it too...wait and see...

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Here are some of my views, again, about Google and its possible future, and no, they are not 'good guys'.

• Google has become a quasi monopolistic instance on the internet
• The FCC has noticed it and they are now thinking about 'search neutrality'
• No, Google are not such good guys, neither that innovative, and tend to buy everything they can to crush the concurrence, or to bypass their search own algorithms to promote their products
• Not only the FCC has noticed that, but some devs are getting worried too
• Their relevance is less and less a fact, and they might be outsmarted by social networking websites
• Not long until a broader public notices it
• Still, going open would clean all this mess

If you've had the luck to spend some of you bits of boredom reading this blog, you probably know that I like to follow Google's strategies and evolution. You also probably know it somewhat worries me, even if I'm still enthused by their product.

It's too bad I'm publishing this post now, since everybody is busy with end-of-the-year-festivities and nobody will notice the fabulous article I am linking here: Search, but You May Not Find (nytimes.com)

It's all about search neutrality, or how Google, Yahoo and Bing are now "the gatekeepers of the internet". How it can unbalance the market and how someone should do something about it.

It begins on this cheerful note (bold is mine):

The need for search neutrality is particularly pressing because so much market power lies in the hands of one company: Google. With 71 percent of the United States search market (and 90 percent in Britain), Google’s dominance of both search and search advertising gives it overwhelming control. Google’s revenues exceeded $21 billion last year, but this pales next to the hundreds of billions of dollars of other companies’ revenues that Google controls indirectly through its search results and sponsored links.

Ok, until now nothing really new, we already know Google is very big. The sponsored links and search result part is maybe a bit less obvious, since many users are now tending to think that Google is the Internet. Think about it, not only G (I'll call it G yes, I feel lazy tonight) has contributed to create some huge fortunes, but there is now a whole market of SEO consulting and optimization entirely centered on them. Frightening bit, when you think about the metric cartload of so called "SEO specialist", Black Hat SEO pseudo hackers, content and link farms gravitating around it. G has an enormous influence on the economy both above and underground, and if you're in IT, you probably owe it your job, a way or another.

Ok, this bit is secured, pretty glad it was obvious.Next:

Another way that Google exploits its control is through preferential placement [..]promoting its own services at or near the top of its search results, bypassing the algorithms it uses to rank the services of others[...] Wherever it does so, incumbents are toppled, new entrants are suppressed and innovation is imperiled.[...]Some will argue that Google is itself so innovative that we needn’t worry. But the company isn’t as innovative as it is regularly given credit for[...]Google’s meteoric success, are essentially borrowed inventions: Google acquired AdSense by purchasing Applied Semantics in 2003; and AdWords, though developed by Google, is used under license from its inventors, Overture.

NICE TO KNOW! And nice to know I'm not a lunatic, the whole article make me feel I'm not alone, and this bit precisely, makes me feel that I'm right to worry.
That's one thing if Google is what it pretends to be, (that is: an open and innovative search engine pushing everyday the limits of information gathering and usability), and another thing altogether when it appears that the G is a buy-and-squash machine, intending to become the one vortex to any info hosted,shared, advertised or created on the web, from anywhere.

You can perfectly react thinking that, after all, they are offering a free service and no company should rely on free services (yeahright), that after all, they have the right to advertise their own product (it's not like they were, say, Microsoft and bundling, say, a browser with their operating system). And well, if people are so worried, people shall build their own monopolistic search engine.

Thinking like that would be logical, but no thank you. Be it with OS, Telecoms or search engines, monopole is bad.

From this point, how is the future branching?

G's core functionality is slowly but surely losing its appeal, losing relevance everyday while being submerged by content/link farms, domain parkers ands the likes. Users are more and more accustomed to seek information through social networking rather than organic search. Online marketers are aware of that.
Big Daddy G has also proven to be hungry enough to worry the FCC, that's almost an epiphany.
Until now, all they needed to do in order to prove the 'purity' of their policies was to hurl widgets at the crowd while screaming "We are no evil!". FCC is bad publicity, they will have to work harder.
If nothing is done, they could leave the lead to other runner-ups such as Cuil and "the word of the fingers". Worse, some developers are being seriously annoyed by their API policy and the word could spread pretty fast, leaving them without another major source of innovation.
See by yourself (readwriteweb.com and totlol.com)

Google releases a public API. They watch what third-party developers do with the API and modify the Terms of Service (ToS) for that API in a way that prevents breakthrough potential. Google may then move to offer a similar service based on their platform rather than the API.

That, dear sir, is a pissed-off developer talking from experience.

In order to regain the relevance they build their reputation upon, going social would be a great idea. It would also, if the FCC rules out for a search neutrality regulation, reinforce the hegemony driven image they are starting to acquire.

What they could do though, to get rid of any suspicions and confirm their good will toward the users and the Quality Of The Interwebs, is to go 100% open, even if they don't really seem to like the idea.

Year 2010 will be interesting. Wait and see.

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This Christmas, Amazon have been selling more kindle than physical books.

For those who still don't know the kindle is an e-book reader, you can access to an online library and download your e-books, and do everything you'd to usually except maybe reading in the bath.
I hate the product, deeply, due to very shady terms of use, I've blogged about it before.

It kills me to know that while privacy is becoming a major topic, which will probably be buzzing all around the web in 2010, people still fall for a device that spies on everything you read.

According to the chart on eff.org, the Kindle is not the only guilty one here, Google Books and the BnB Nook are also sharing information about your readings... to third party service providers.

Who are the third party service providers? I just wish it's not a potential future Independent Bureau Of Thought Correctness...

Well, just wait, see, and hope New Moon is never made illegal.

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