This is a response to Greplin’s challenge to improve Wikipedia’s search.
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Apart from that. I am busy developing my API at the MIH Medialab. Thoroughly enjoying the environment and I’m spending most of my coding time now on completing a prototype!
As part of my studies this year, I’m doing research into various social network API’s that exist on the web. To motivate me, I’ve thought I’d blog about various interesting things I find: interesting API’s, interesting applications of these API’s and so forth.
Today, I found Google’s Prediction API. This is incredible. It allows you to utilise Google’s machine learning algorithms and get back predictions.
Interesting things that can be done with it:
Given a user’s past viewing habits, predict what other movies or products a user might like.
Categorize emails as spam or non-spam.
Analyze posted comments about your product to determine whether they have a positive or negative tone.
Guess how much a user might spend on a given day, given his spending history.
It essentially pushes a large chunk of processing to Google. I’ve found very few API’s that actually provide processing. This is new, and could bring forth an interesting trend for specialised processing API’s (that might even charge for its use).
So, there’s been rumours floating around for a while of Google’s supposed Facebook “killer” called Google Me. It has now been denied. Whether this is true or not, I believe Google has been approaching social a bit wrong (like Mark Zuckerberg said). The past two previous big-ish attempts into the social arena wave (supposedly e-mail killer) and buzz both kind of failed. Well, Wave failed not so much of the social aspect, just that no one actually knew what to do with it. Uses were invented, but a product should of course have a clear intuitive use.
The way ‘Wave’ and ‘Buzz’ worked, is that it started out by automatically taking your social ties from your current Google contacts. In omst cases, this meant gleaming your contacts from your gmail. Now, my gmail contacts is a totally different ‘social network’. I speak to maybe 3-4 of them daily, but that’s it. The rest is just there, because Google decided once I mailed people it should pop up on chat list. I have nothing wrong with this. I remove people that I know for sure I won’t talk to again, but I don’t actively curate it. I see no reason why, it is too small. Now when Wave came along, Google assumed the people I want to “wave” with, is my gmail contacts. It is a fair assumption, but was it the best social network to wave with? I just wanted to wave with maybe 3 people, my brother and 2 friends, organizing a DnD campaign. The other people were now in my ‘wave’ contacts. It was too much of an effort to take them out. So I just left them there.
But it left with me the idea that my wave contacts were there. That is who I’m going to wave… People I don’t talk to. I didn’t really go back. I didn’t use wave after organizing that DnD campaign. Before I continue, let’s look at Buzz.
Google thought my gmail contacts were the people I’d like to ‘buzz’ with. Still, a fair assumption, but isn’t there a better network suited for this? I don’t use Buzz. It only imports my twitter feed these days. It is an annoyance I’d do without. Once Buzz opened it automatically took my gmail contacts as the people I’d “share” with. Wrong. I had to remove some people, unfollow others and so forth. Bleh.
What I’m trying to say is, is that each product will have its own social network, the people I’d like to share with in that “area”/”network”. Facebook is my network for my personal real-world relations. I’d like to keep it that way. That’s what I decided Facebook should be for me. I decided Twitter is my ‘open’ online presence, the place where I meet new people, share information with like-minded individuals and just participate in the online stream. That is what I decided Twitter should be for me. Other people have other ideals. Some make their Facebook totally open, some make their Twitter private.
Google is behind on social and they desperately want to grab hold where Facebook is gaining. They are scared and they want to catch up. They are doing it wrong. By trying to impose the social connections they have made, people will stop using it, because as mentioned, each social network has its own use imposed by the users. Companies shouldn’t impose the social connections they think we will have.
So with a trailing thought, I really hope that if Google is working on a social network, they don’t impose social connections. They are big enough to launch anything. I’ll create my own connections thank you! Not only does create it it more hype (“are you on Google Me?”), but there is also the fun of connecting in different networks (“starting afresh”). If the product is good enough, I’m sure people won’t mind the effort to re-establish connections. I think it is much better in the long run.
If you have heard of Facebook Login fail on RWW, read this first. It’s actually hilarious! But after guffaws and chuckles, it made me think, semantically.
My thoughts were echoed on RWW follow up post to what happened. Just a brief background on what happened. People searched “facebook login”, came upon RWW’s article, mistook it for Facebook, signed in via Facebook Connect and ranted how its new “design sucks ass”. To all of us in the “know”, it is funny and facepalm worthy. How idiotic could these people be? Can’t they distinguish between these things?
Apparently not:
As the web is becoming global (1 Billion+), it is becoming the playground for people not literate at all with basic things like a URL. They see Facebook as a product/service, not as a website that is part of the WWW.
It begs the question if these people are actually idiotic at all? Yes, they might not know the inner workings of the web, do you know the inner workings of a TV (or something equally complex)? Bad example, but you catch my drift.
Shouldn’t this “portal” to the net, being Google’s search bar allow us to take us where we want to go on the “interwebs”? It makes perfect sense to want to type into Google, “login Facebook”, to take me to where I want to be, without having to click on a search result.
How Google would deduce this when people would just want to “search” the term I’ll leave to the semantic experts. I have some ideas though.
1) Once it becomes clear what the user’s purpose is for each intended search, Google could ask the “searcher”, considering they are logged on with a profile, if that is their intention each time? Click yes, and it does it all the time.
2) We could use the power of humans to vote on preferred actions for terms. People vote that if you type in “login facebook”, it takes you there, while others might vote that it should stay a search term. There are obvious flaws with this approach and possibility for exploitation.
3) Pay? Enough money will convince Google. Instead of using the normal “sponsored by google” ads at the top of some search results, it could be a different colour with a click-able link that immediately takes you to facebook. If you cookies are set, it’s logged in. I guess this approach is very much similar to ads, but there is the potential to add further action with these links.
4) Invent new search “terms” such as the already established “define: <word>”. If you type in “login: Facebook”, it should take you stored Facebook login data on Google’s profile and immediately log yourself in, or just immediately take you to Facebook if you are already logged in.
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These are just some ideas I had to write down. Kept thinking about it whole day. What do you think? The approaches above are flawed. Can you think of any way to approach this? Would Google even want people to NOT view their search results?
After studying for a test this past week, I reaffirmed a theory of mine. It’s not technically a theory. It is already happening, and I think most people can agree.
I have to remember about 300 pages for a test. I’ve realised how I remember the knowledge. I remember where the information and even sometimes how the data was structured on the page, but I couldn’t remember the details. To me, it feels like the pointers to memory that are used in computers.
I feel that our generation, driven by the internet (Google and Wikipedia) where we have a wealth of information at our fingertips start to think about our knowledge in a different way. We don’t make the effort to remember all the data, but rather only remember where to get it, once we need it.
So in essence, my knowledge is being reduced to a bank of pointers of which Google and Wikipedia are the most important (Wolfram to a lesser extent).
In the past, it could’ve existed to a lesser extent, ie just go to the library to get your information, but the effort required was much greater. To me it is apparent that it is becoming more profound.
Is it good or bad? I’d say, it’s a natural progression for the merging of humans and technology. I’m no expert on “brain power”, but it seems obvious that we don’t to spend too much time to remember it all, but rather spending time on applying our knowledge.
It is now the middle of 2009 and the web landscape is already looking very different from the start of 2009. Twitter is primarily responsible for the surge into the real-time web. Seeing Twitter’s success in covering news before any main news site is remarkable. It is here. It is now.
Facebook saw the success of Twitter and subsequently changed their homepage (which I still think is a bad choice). Facebook also made the status update feed real-time: an inevitable change, considering they also opened the status API. What is this Facebook? Are you trying to become Twitter with photos and quizzes? C’mon now.
Seeing the real-time building, Google saw that they were losing search power and made options available to their search to make it more real-time.
The biggest surprise to the real-time venue is definitely Google’s Wave. Will it change the way we interact on the internet? Who knows. When you see a wave (a real one) approach, it might seem huge, but that might mean it might break before it’s of any use to the surfer. Meh, it’s a bad analogy, but you get my point. Will be really interesting to see what Google Wave can pull off!
So where to now?
I didn’t expect to see this surge into the real-time web. I’m wondering what web services will filter into the real-time environment. The implications are immense to me. It means that people are now even more connected, right now. Within 5 minutes of it happening, I knew about the hudson river plane crash.
What implications it has on our psyche, I don’t know. We are more and more, constantly aware of the world and its happenings…
Where do you think the real-time web will go? What do you think the psychological implications are for being constantly and instantly connected?