Matthew Allen

Update: as evidenced by this report, on unique visitors to FB and Google, industry commentators still don’t get the difference between these two giant net companies. Equally, FB putting realtime search into its environment (acquiring FriendFeed) also doesn’t in any way demonstrate equivalence between the two. Both reflect a relatively simplistic understanding of the net as a place for searching and for getting lots of visitors. (Think, for example, of google search is embedded inside many applications and services – Google doesn’t need people to go to its hompage!)

Ultimately, reflecting on some twitter comments (thanks @baym and @amuir_netecol) from my last post , I am drawn to the comparison between Facebook as the massive department store within which all wants and desires are collected, strucutured and offered: some of the ‘departments’ are franchises, essentially leased from the main store, others are owned by the store. Just like department stores are designed to lure customers in, and make it hard to leave, with astute physical environments that prevent ‘walk through’, so too Facebook acquires as much of a user’s attention as possible and then distributes it across several applications, engagements and the like. While much of what is there is equivalent to each other, there is also a lot of care taken to avoid direct competition inside the store – there is one shoe department, not 10. Google is like a bazaar or marketplace in which there are numerous identical stalls and services all being offered at once, in a rowdy, complex way, built into the fabric of the town or city.

These are neither better or worse models for online living (though I know which I prefer personally): but they are very different, non-competing modes of online exploitation. Perhaps then it isn’t ever a question of Google vs Facebook: it’s another sign of the divergence in media models (channels, brands, etc) when they fall into the formless, malleable world of the Internet.

I commented recently on Twitter that Facebook = the new AOL and, not surprisingly, then discovered that many others (e.g. Kottke.org had already had my apparently novel insight! (This effect can either deflate one’s confidence or increase it – I am not the first, but I am as wise as the crowd – some examples from the crowd thanks to googlesearch). And, clearly, Facebook is trying to create an experience of online life / augmented reality / social and cognitive networking that stands apart from, or is potentially isolated from the ‘web’ within which Facebook exists – though it claims to be embedding itself into the web, of becoming a sort of underlying social networking of people, data and places throughout the web, I actually see the plan as one to enable its users to never leave the facebook environment except when prompted to do so by something in facebook, and then be returned to facebook. So, in this model of online behaviour, Facebook users would look out over the low walls of the garden and observe interesting things elsewhere in the jungle of the net; would at times scurry out into that jungle, but otherwise would remain safely inside the habitat of Facebook. As Siliconbeat reports, Google should be worried about this new wave of Facebook’s expansion of the way it will encompass online behaviours into a single space: communities that serve Facebook.

There’s a real sense of imperialism about Facebook. Sure we worry about the approach to privacy (see Raynes-Goldie, First Monday and the casual manner in which Facebook treats its users, by changing rules on them, making them feel (and indeed be) disconnected from their data bodies. But what worries me more, at this stage, is how Facebook is attempting to exploit more and more of the Internet for its marketing purposes (through the ‘like’ function, and by embedding internet affordances into its environment) and to claim that what matters in information acquisition and production is what is liked, or networked, between its users. (note too – Facebook acts as if everyone online is a Facebook user – a lot of them just don’t know it yet). So the challenge we face in responding to Facebook and its extraordinary (and network-effect growing) power is not how Facebook works in its own terms (after all, one can opt out, to some extent, if you don’t like it), but how it acquisitively eyes the Internet as the source of the raw informational material which it needs to sustain itself.

Google has an equally imperial view of information – witness the book digitisation issue, the constant acquisition of individual online behavioural data. What I find interesting to consider, though, is the difference between how these two behemoths of the online world approach their activities. Google achieves its empire (an empire of mind and data) by networking diverse nodes together – there is, really, no one place where Google ‘is’ and can be found / managed or located. Googlemaps tells us that Google is everyone and nowhere all at once. Note how Facebook is absolutely locatable – it’s all about what happens inside that Facebook environment (content brought into that space); Google is all about what happens everywhere else (but monitored by Google). And, while Google ‘profiles’ us when we sign up for its services (and even when we don’t), there is one key component of most online activities which we don’t find through Google – the public profile. Google is, truly, ‘faceless’ book – except that your face is very clear to google, if you choose to embrace its multitude of data services.

Facebook, then, strikes me as the inheritor of Yahoo!’s location in the web-world of the 2000s – a place for ‘us’ to form networks; the networks are a consequence of accepting what we give up when we use Facebook. Google is the service where the network is t he starting point: the network of data, the networking of us within the infoverse of the Internet. While Facebook might be viewed as a force for the enclosure of the net, as a company that seeks control (and market profitability) through a very explicit presence, an overlording curator of those within its domain, Google – equally potent – disperses itself throughout the Internet; invisibility, implicitness and distributed power work for this company.

Since both of them are searching, in the end, for revenue streams from advertising , Facebook and Google compete (though Facebook is far less pervasive, less successful in those terms). But the competition is not just for ‘who wins the most revenue’: like most deep struggles within capitalism, Facebook and Google are engaged in a kind of ideological struggle to define the Internet in ways which (in the minds of users) will constrain and shape the Internet’s future. So, in years to come, will the Internet be – largely – seen and used inside the low walls of Facebook’s crowded gardens? Or will it be itself the garden, and Google a kind of viral thread interwoven with its every use?

Micro-brainwave…

Murdoch’s campaign on behalf of old media (for which read the Vulpine Empire and its allies) to extract money from Internet gigantors like Google rolls on; just in from the publicity front line, ‘Murdoch warns Google: it’s time to pay’.

One of the things that puzzles me is our tendency to characterise these debates as old media vs new media, whereas I am starting to think that (given what Google is), we probably should see it as old media vs not media. While there are some Internet entities and activities that might be characterised as ‘media’ (in the social institutional sense – eg defined by our operating understandings of ‘the media’ which have developed in the 20th century), there are many – perhaps most – which are not. Moreover, Murdoch/Fox is new media or at least converged media. So, continuing a longstanding distaste for the term new media, can I suggest that the underlying dynamics of the current controversies of over payment for content are because new social forms, like Google, are emerging that are NOT media but which trespass into the economic fiefdoms of media.

Google is not media because it operationalises a different mode of information. Perhaps its motto should be ‘Be Not Media’?

And, by the way, Yahoo’s increasingly tenuous financial claim to exploit online mindshare and relevance suggests that its move to become a media company (see my Argument Against Convergence piece, First Monday) was a bad mistake. Not-media is now the locus of economic insurgency and media is a dangerous place to be.

‘The Googlization of Everything and the Human Knowledge Project’
Keynote presentation by Siva Vaidhyanathan

Blogging, Tweeting and backchanneling… hm…

Books about the Internet are a challenge because of the time from completion to publication and the speed of change in things Internet.

How long can you go without using Google? – Some google product will influence most of your online activities. Despite the short time of the company’s existence it has a profound impact on our lives.

Focus of concern is from the commencement of the Google scanning of millions of library books; worrying for Siva and, moreover, positive reaction from commentators (Kelly, Lessig) also worrying. Is this transformational? Why is it claimed to be? Does it realise librarians’ dreams for perfect digital information sharing?

And yet it seems Google is positively viewed – partly because they give so much, and no money changes hands. We are not Google’s customers, however, we are their product. Google learns from us. Googlization – “processed, rendered and represented by Google” – knowledge, communication and us can be Googlized. [Link to the notion of content-generated user I am developing]. Note the massive array of applications and services within Google. Brin says : perfect search engine would “be like the mind of God”.

So why the blind faith or, at least, significant unquestioning reliance on Google? – well remember the 1990s – how bad search engines were.

Long exposition of the gap between reality and expectation which can be good, but tends at the moment to be about trivial things like, eg, the speed of net connections – expect highspeed; bitch about midspeed, forget that 10 years ago it was probably NO speed.

Google research shows ‘speed’ matters to users; and more speed = more business for and through Google. To achieve that speed, massive computers, brilliant code underneath. This is hidden from users. What makes Google dangerous is less Google, and more our desire for immediate gratification without cost. Speed is part of the problem.

Generates a critique of Google against the idea of ‘evil’. But also emphasises that all companies need to do some things which, if not evil, are hardly ‘benign’. Basically critique is – Google is dishonest in CLAIMING to be altruistic and perfect and fun and good when it should just say, hey, we are a company and are here to make money. And, then, we as users buy into it, because we feel better contributing to the lie. Siva’s critique is principally that Google is committing the sin of hubris – to say ‘Don’t be evil’ is evil (Dante-esque).

Concentrates on the ‘first page’ of Google and everything to do with it. [This seems to me to miss the other point which he commenced with - that googe is everywhere and into everything, well beyond just 'search' and related stuff.]. Long critique of the page-rank approach and how it works: this is well known, but still – does it not also work? Adds the critique of google searches throwing up ‘bad’ results.

Overall: feel that the critique is relatively straightforward, and well put, but dated and presumes a fairly simplistic us and them model of politics.