Ross Mayfield's Weblog

PageRank is Dead (The Rush to SocialRank)

Its so fun to write oversimplified posts about such-and-such is dead. Not because its true. At best you can point out something is broken and alternatives are rising fast.

But I wonder how the people behind the aging technology and cash cow think of it. And some of the most interesting conversations must have been within Google as Facebook was rising up to close the open web, by making new things the web was perhaps missing openly available at scale. Conversations that effect us all.

Maciej Cegłowski has a new, but good-old social software post, about how the abstractions that are social networking sites will never reflect real social networks, and how brands awkwardly fit in them. Pull quotes:

"If the social graph is crude oil, doesn't that make our friends and colleagues the little animals that get crushed and buried underground?"

"Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender." 

"Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers - that's the social graph."

"Now tell me one bit of original culture that's ever come out of Facebook."

Today Google+ opened up the first iteration of its Brand Pages. As with anything big and new in social they are met with both joy, fear and skepticism. A visceral new example of Maciej's quote on marketers above.

You see, as Facebook effectively took a massive amount of people's time off of the open and discoverable web, and with Like took their gesture otherwise as the big fat input. PageRank initially relied on a few strong inputs from people who realized their own power an skill to publish. Then with social search it didn't need so much power (e.g. this post). Then it was commoditized down to a single click. The single gesture of someone logged in somewhere. Probably where they have committed their time and identity because of a broad social pressure that exists in the real world.

But I found this single image today absolutely stunning:

If it wasn't clear, Google is all-in with +1 and Google+. And interestingly giving brands a very direct role in directing gestures with it. All +1s can be consolidated for a brand. And lo and behold, Google is creating a namespace to replace URLs. If you type + before something in Google or their browser bar, you get autocomplete for a Google+ Brand Page that has aggregated all the gesture in the direction that brand organizes and in part pays for. All SEO practices are about to be rewritten.

But here's what's interesting. +1 keeps evolving towards an alternative to penetrate the social and otherwise closed web without Google+ being sucessfull. I don't think this is a new point, or inherently evil. Its just become more visceral.

Maciej's post focuses on how nodes and edges in a graph can never truly be representational. No more so than how profiles will always be a lie and out of date, but at least they are from just the point of view of an author. But gesture of attention have always been simple enough to say, look here. And with social search you get that fuzzy implicit semantic bullshit to say this language means something like the way you are talking to the command line. Its not as perfect and impossible as ODF bullshit. But its coming faster, with new politics and commercial interests than ever.

The gesture equivalent to making a link of course got easier. But the ownership of that gesture for those who are at scale has as well.

(disclosure, I tried to get a job at Google in 2002. I told them I wanted to build a +/- gesture graph for search, blogging and social networking. Probably bad ideas. I didn't get the job, but that is more proof that I'm a loser than the need for disclosure)

Nofollow Default on Google Sites

As I've blogged about for some time now, nofollow tags are not a fit for wikis.  Kevin Burton notes it is the default for all links in Google Sites:

The rel=nofollow attribute is a cancer that’s destroying the link graph.

Every URL I create is going to be blocked from link based trust metrics like PageRank? That’s just dumb. I’d rather use another wiki system that doesn’t penalize my linking behavior.

I realize that your intention is to fight spam but you should pursue and algorithmic approach. Blacklisting the entire Internet is NOT the solution.

It’s clear by now that Google uses other metrics for page ranking (almost certainly including HTTP traffic monitoring by now) so this isn’t the end of the world.

Linking is the whole point of the Internet! Creating road blocks for EVERY LINK in the system is the antithesis of a free an open web!

I'm glad Kevin is saying nofollow is not the web (outside of the blogs and comments it was designed for) and in this world view you can only give Google Juice and it doesn't give back.  Such a view and action only favors those in a dominant network position.

Jotspot Finally Revived as Google Sites

When Jotspot was acquired by Google, I was obviously waiting and watching for them to make something out of it.  Rob Hof reports that it is launching tonight as Google Sites.

Ever since Google bought the wiki-based online application startup Jotspot in late 2006, people have been wondering if it had disappeared forever inside the bowels of the search giant. Tonight, Google’s launching Google Sites, using Jotspot’s technology to create a free group collaboration service that will be part of its online software suite Google Apps.

He goes on to compare it with Sharepoint and Lotus Notes, which is a stretch of the imagination.  I have no doubt that Google Apps is a great long term bet, and Sites will raise individual awareness of a simpler way to work together. 

And with a lot of retrospection I have tremendous respect for Joe and Co.

All I can really say for now is welcome back to our party.

Going Lijit

Yesterday I happened to speak with a blog friend for the first time, Brad Feld, and he told me about Lijit.  Its a social search play that creates a widget for searching across your blog, social bookmarks and blogroll.  Today they announced $3.3M in funding from Boulder Ventures.

I've added it to the bottom right of my blog.  You can also play with it on their site, where I found Rick Klau, or on Paul Kedrosky's blog.  When setting up Ligit they have a swift utility for adding content sources such as Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Del.icio.us, Stumble Upon, Flickr, Youtube and MyBlogLog. Adding the widget is simple, you gain a different kind of insight into use and you can browse implicit and explicit profiles.  Lijit reminds me of Dandelife's Lifestreaming and Sam Ruby's MeMeme for the network represented and Eurekster and MyBlogLog for the widget effect.  Its still early for Lijit, and I'll be watching the results as they come in.

The Search for Trust

Blake Ross of Mozilla chides Google for giving preferential placement to their own apps as "Tips" in search results.

The tips are different—and bad for users—because the services they recommend are not the best in their class. If Google wants to make it faster and easier for users to manage events, create a blog or share photos, it could do what it does when you search GOOG: link to the best services. To prevent Google from being the gatekeeper, the company could identify the services algorithmically.

If you guess where I am going with this, you are probably wrong.

Blake's argument is right, in that Tips subvert Google's mission statement, is a breach of trust, degrades the relevance of search, is outside being a customer of their own advertising and amounts to a new age of bundling with the deception of choice.

But wait, there is more.  This could be seen as a commercial interest defining a default.  As much as it pains me to point it out, doesn't the Firefox browser offer the Google browser as the default due to revenue incentives?

TIP: the answer to the above question is provided in comments

I believe search and access to search should be a democratic function.  Whenever markets are left to their own devices to determine access to information, the result is arbitrage conditions that hamper innovation, yield profit to the few and stunt principles as core as freedom of speech and assembly.  Such freedoms are not to be trees in a walled wood.  You have a right to make what you say and the group you form accessible and discoverable.

Search today is not democratic.  Anchor text is a tool of anchor tenants. PageRank is in the hands of a growing few.  PigeonRank is a minority species, of similar size to algorithm inclines.  Social search is not yet a function of using search.  In search relevance will always be representative.  But we are still playing by electoral college rules.

Wikiasari was launched before fueling, but over time it represents a more democratic web.  Social search, with a full feedback look between results and the ability for a user to be resultant, has yet to be fulfilled.

We will have a search engine powered by they very users it employs, and empowers.  When spam like Tips are advocated by a spending empowered minority, the larger body will be empowered to correct.  Even the default of accessing it.

SuiteTwo Launched: Enterprise 2.0 in a Box

A small dream of mine came true today.  We've been preaching an ecosystem of tools for some time now.  We've helped customers stitch them together in interesting ways.  In fact, Andrew McAfee's original article on Enterprise 2.0 was borne from observing what was happening in one of our customers and projecting into the future.  Well, future happens fast.

Looking back, look what I blogged just before the first Web 2.0 conference:

I'm providing a workshop on Enterprise Social Software with Socialtext Customer Mike Pusateri from Disney.  You might recall his great presentation at the at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Confererence in February. Mike and his team are leading the way with how they are using lightweight web-native tools as a platform for productivity. Not just how they use Socialtext for project communication, but how they stitch it together Moveable Type and Newsgator for an ecosystem of tools with RSS.

That was then, this is now. This morning I provided a workship on Enterprise 2.0.

Today we announced SuiteTwo, The Enterprise 2.0 Suite powered by Intel.  Intel is distributing the Best of Breed wiki (Socialtext), blog (Six Apart), Feed Aggregation (Newsgator) and Feed Publishing (SimpleFeed), supported by Spikesource, through its channels including Dell, NEC, Ingram, Novell and Red Hat.

This fulfills Andrew McAfee's vision of Enterprise 2.0.  In a box.  Made simple for Small-to-Mid-sized Enterprises.  Extensible because we've all supported open APIs.  Enterprise 2.0 is freeform social software adapted for organizations.  SuiteTwo is the first offering to realize the SLATES paradigm:

SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

In the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, McAfee went further to distinguish this Network IT (NIT) from Functional IT and Enterprise IT:

As the DrKW example illustrates, NIT’s principal capabilities include the following:

• Facilitating collaboration. Network technologies allow employees to work together but don’t define who should work with whom or what projects employees should work on. At DrKW, ad hoc teams have formed because employees read one another’s blogs. These teams have used the wiki to accomplish tasks, and they have disbanded without orders from senior executives.

• Allowing expressions of judgment. NITs are egalitarian technologies that let people express opinions. DrKW employees use blogs to voice their views about everything from open-source software to interest rate movements.

• Fostering emergence. “Emergence” is the appearance of high-level patterns or information because of low-level interactions. These patterns are useful because they allow managers to compare how work is done with how it’s supposed to be done. Emergence is also valuable for users. For instance, employees can easily search and navigate DrKW’s blogs and wiki for trends and data even though nobody is in charge of making them easy to use.

...Employees exploit older NITs such as e-mail and instant messaging on their own, but business leaders have a role to play in exploiting newer technologies like blogs and wikis. They can help sustain and increase the use of complements to make the technology continually more effective, primarily by guiding users. Darren Leonard, a managing director in the global equity derivatives business at Dresdner Kleinwort, recalls how he got his colleagues to use the company’s wiki: “First, if a wiki has no structure, it’s perceived not as an opportunity but as anarchy, and our people have no time for anarchy. I went back to my initial pages and rewrote them to be a lot more directive. For example, I made a page with the agenda for an upcoming meeting and asked people to add to it. Second, wikis have to be clearly better than other ways of collaborating. There have to be uses [for them] that demonstrate their power. One of these uses came prior to a special senior management meeting where we could bring questions from our groups and get them answered. I put up a page…asking my [team members] what questions they wanted me to ask on their behalf. People used the page to post questions, edit them, and discuss which ones were the most important and why. That really accelerated wiki use. Finally, old habits are hard to break. The tendency is for people to keep using e-mail because that’s what they know....I have to [tell them], ‘I’m not reading e-mails on this topic. Use the wiki’ or ‘Everyone’s assignments are on this page—use the same page to report on progress.’”

Lead users and enterprises already work this way today.  Only they do so without usable efficiency.  Integrated single sign-on, search and tag cloud are just the beginning.  One click subscription to a page, blog post, search query, report, weblog and wiki make feeds usable (unlike today's user experience, when they click on an orange icon and think their browser is broken).  Rapidly form groups, draft together on a wiki page, publish to a blog and track results. 

Beyond making such tasks efficient, the benefits to productivity, discovering emergent intelligence and high-engagement marketing are significant.  Very soon a user will wake up in the morning, log in to SuiteTwo, immediately recognize something emerging.  With the top blog posts telling her what the company is talking about, the top wiki pages showing her what people are working on, top posts from the outside that her company is subscribed to and the feedback from what they are publishing
-- something will emerge.  She recognizes the opportunity, pulls on the social fabric and easily forms a diverse group of experts.  They follow new feeds and generates others while working with a little productive friction.  They develop a plan and draft a new offering in the wiki.  They publish to a public blog and track where it goes. The feedback loops continue, she goes home for the day and the organization is bound to adapt again.

This isn't your Dad's enterprise, but one you will be working with soon.

Tagopoly

Yahoo acquired del.icio.us.  Congrats Joshua!

Wonder what was the price per tag.  What this really means is that Yahoo Social Search is a serious alternative for everyday use.

More: Zawodny, the VC, TechCrunch, Om digs it,  Rafat

UPDATE:  Let me explain the above statement.

Yahoo Social Search always held promise of more relevant, useful and fun search.  Just one problem.  Not only did I have to use it for it to be useful, so did my friends.  Now, with the del.icio.us acquisition, my online social network does.  Then consider the high-level metadata they have with del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming and more to come; and how they leverage it to enhance search overall.  That is, of course, if they respect the social contact with the community and continue the process of opening (they are far from done). 

In other words, because of this move, Yahoo may become my primary search engine.  This monopoly game is getting interesting.

My bet for the next acquisition?  Feedburner. 

Google SkypePO

I've held back on this thought, but could Google's Secondary Public Offering (SPO) be to buy Skype?

Nah, they are too into build over buy these days. I just wanted to say SkypePO.

Where's the Vertical Exit?

Vertical Search is one of the hottest sectors these days, with startups being built to flip in every vertical and horizontal you can think of.  Reminds me of B2B, although there is decided value being created by many of them.

But doesn't it strike you as odd that there hasn't been any Vertical Search acquisitions?  I might be wrong here, but it does seem like a very big assumption that the otherwise acquisitive search players will buy instead of build.  Maybe it's just to early.

UPDATE, from comments:

• Shopping.com acquired by eBay
• workzoo acquired by Jobster

 

The Things we Forget

Lately I have been thinking about the things we forget. Think how Englebart invented everything we are trying to implement today. Sure it is easier, perhaps even possible. But perhaps because it hasn't been built yet, it's really hard to build upon the work that preceded us.

We laud blogs as a personal memory bank, but it is limited to our memory. And search to augmenent. I do think, despite obvious tool bias, that Wikipedia and more specialized and private wikis hold the chance of constructive recall. Wikipedia doesn't defeat Google, yet. But how we accrete knowledge today still sucks (time, at least).

So let me share an honest story about enterprise wiki use. We recently improved search in Socialtext by what I perceive as a 10x enhancement. I say perceived, because any search enhancement is not something you can purely measure, but is a function of user experience. Sure, I can say that it's friggin' fast and have metrics to back it up. But making it fast, expanding it's scope to include MS Office enhancements, or limiting it's scope by tag let's you discover what may be relevant. Relevance is is in the proverbial eye of the user.

The point is that good search combined with wicked fast page and editor load enables a different mode of wiki use. The easy way to create a wiki is messy. A repository (non-PC term being garbage dump).

Some repositories rely on structure to restrict our inclination to dump. Dumping is inherently human, we give brain dumps and want to as a function of sharing. We create waste and want the system to recycle. Any system is inherently powered by systems and isn't closed. We may automate to gain efficiencies, but unless it augments the system simply processes instead of augments.

But as designers, no matter how much we believe in the perfection of our expertise or what we may create, it still sucks. And the perfection of how users use is several orders below what we intend.

Still we structure. Bind users with rules we think is best. If they obey, the world is in order. At least our small world, perfect world, Such is the folly of thinking you are a designer. Ego is easy. Knowing that the people who really can grant you ego are the people you don't intimately know is knowing when you have been psyched out or when you are affirmed. When you apply structure you are governing others. A power to wield graciously. Something easy to put aside for sake of progress, but that's just your short term progress.

I am a pompous ass, but stay with me...

So, we are building a wiki. We can slap on structure and call it a panacea. If you think past one use, you may believe it, and buy into it. But life, and work, isn't static -- and it is diverse.

So you are building a wiki. You can certainly learn great practices to keep a tidy garden as it seeks to grow around you. But you can't boil it all down to forms and structure and get real contribution. People already have that, and they don't use it ( they use email instead). Embracing mess offers a third way to enable contribution and delivery value.

This is a round-about way to say that the dumping ground use case for wikis is not just accessible, but valid. Good search enables people to get past form applications, even get pass formality of contribution practices. It let's us simply contribute, knowing that we can recall later. Others can recall, edit it, link or tag it, and it will pop back to top of mind if it is important. We can forget when immediately processing what crosses our desk when we have confidence in rapid recall.

Today we don't have good enough search, at least to us. It relies on people being smart in how they discover. But we can acknowledge what we have built and where it needs to go. Openly, you might even help us take it in a better direction.