Social Media, Niches, and Search
January 14, 2011
MySpace seems to be struggling. “Struggling” may be the wrong word, particularly if you were one of the hundreds of employees nuked in the riffing a few days ago. You can get the “real” news from Silicon Republic’s “MySpace Confirms Layoffs of 500 Staff Members.” I never was a MySpacer.
Image Source: http://www.webguild.org/20110104/myspace-to-layoff-50-of-employees. Good write up too.
The last time I watched a demo, the page on display flickered and brayed noise. What I do associate with MySpace are:
- iPad publisher and financial expert, Rupert Murdoch paid $580 million for the ur-Facebook.
- Mr. Murdoch’s comment: “The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.” Source: Woopidoo.com here. I think of this quote when I read about Facebook’s Goldman Sachs’s deal and the MySpace “challenge”.
But what is interesting is that social media content is moving into a walled garden. Facebook’s content has value partly because of its walled garden. Even Google’s shift in support for content on YouTube reminds me of an exclusionary move. The chatter about curation, filtering, and controls translate in my addled goose brain to a shift from open to closed.
This has several implications for search:
First, the idea of going one place to access content is getting more and more difficult. I think the hurdles posed by registration processes and other methods of capturing “value” are building blocks of a new type of digital real estate: the private park, the walled garden, and a snooty country club. Who will be able to access which service for information.
Second, search is going to require a user to run the same query in different systems and then aggregate the meaningful results. Federated search is going to be increasingly important. Few users will tolerate manual hunting for a content collection, registering and maybe paying for access, and then figuring out what to do with results from different collections.
A bastion of the old way in the online walled garden business.
Third, because of the difficulty in accessing content, users—particularly in North America—will create an interesting new market for snippets, digests, and nuggets. Research for some people will become variations on “Farmville for Dummies” and “How to Lose 10 Pounds in 10 Days.”
What I find really interesting is that “the Internet” seems to be shaping into a variant of the original online industry. Content islands have to be visited by a researcher on a digital cruise ship. The pricing, access methods, and restrictions will vary. I thought research the pre-Internet way was gone for good.
Nope.
It’s 1980 all over again.
Stephen E Arnold, January 14, 2011
Freebie
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