The Google Anthill
May 27, 2009
I find the metaphor – ah, well – inspiring. Ants evoke an image of a mass of workers carrying out the dictates of either genes or a very influential boss ant. If you want to know more about the anthill analogy, you will want to read “Watch the Google Anthill Move toward Social and Real Time” by Robert Scoble here. My recollection is that ant colonies move. The ant hills – particularly the big, hard ones in Brazil – don’t move. Enough nit picking. The key point in Mr. Scoble’s essay, in my opinion, was this passage:
Google is more like an ant hill. One powered by 20% time which is how the ants find out where the food is. Heck, enough of Google’s ants have left to join Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed, that it should be clear by now there’s some new tasty food bits that they aren’t yet munching on. Heck, Friendfeed should be a major embarrassment to Google since that 14-person team has at least five Google superstars on it (the guy who came up with the idea for Google not to be evil started the company. That’s Paul Buchheit and he also ran the Gmail team. Also on the Friendfeed team is the guy who ran the Google Talk team, the guy who ran Google Maps team, the designer for a whole bunch of Googley products, and the guy who ran the backend team on Gmail). Over at Facebook and Twitter I keep running into people who used to work at Google too.
Two thoughts:
First, maybe the ants are moving to a new colony, intermarrying, and creating a new species, a super social nerd ant and colony?
Second, ants move on when the food supply is exhausted.
Is this happening at Google?
Stephen Arnold, May 28, 2009
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