Real-time web

In his 2010 projections, John Battelle touches on search:

7. Traditional search results will deteriorate to the point that folks begin to question search’s validity as a service. This does not mean people will stop using search – habits do not die that quickly and search will continue to have significant utility. But we are in the midst of a significant transition in search – as I’ve recently written, we are asking far more complicated questions of search, ones that search is simply not set up to answer. This incongruence is not really fair to blame on search, but so it goes. Add to this the problem of an entire ecosystem set up to game AdWords, and the table is set. Google will take most of the brand blame, but also do the most to address the issue in 2010.

This dovetails nicely with David Carr’s rumination on Twitter in this Sunday’s New York Times. Despite his initial skepticism and subsequent floundering, Twitter has become Carr’s de facto information stream.

At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup: if it looks like Apple is going to demo its new tablet, or Amazon sold more Kindles than actual books at Christmas, or the final vote in the Senate gets locked in on health care, I almost always learn about it first on Twitter.

What’s going on?

The divergence between the basic premise of Google and the basic interests of people is becoming more clear.

Google has a clear underlying industrial logic: to organize all the world’s information. It’s a meta-Library of Congress, real-time, ubiquitous and, in its most pristine expression, neutral.

A storehouse of information is a really cool and useful thing.

But when I want to find something out, I like knowing what other people are saying. What’s a good restaurant? What’s the best Droid phone to get? Who’s making some interesting music?

These are the kinds of questions that get answered in the give and take of social dialogue, daily interactions between each of us and the people who we know and that we meet. These interactions have got dimensionality that allow us to give them relative weight. Some we pay close attention to, some less.

“Search” is a highly functioning technological artifact that solves a specific problem presented by the design limitations of web-based information data bases.

My social graph, in all of its various permutations, has a design that is more closely aligned with the human bias of social interactions. Social media, as Carr observes of Twitter, keeps me in the flow and lets me pick and choose from the flow when I need to.

That’s a dynamic, people-based activity set that does things that Search can’t ever hope to do and that technology solutions will only be able to offer a faint shadow of.

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