Robert Scoble made a series of videos about how Google is going to be beaten by Mahalo, TechMeme and Facebook. Some reaction to this can be found here. Two responses that I found useful - Danny Sullivan’s and randfish of SEOmoz.org.
After reading everything, my first thought is that we are stuck in the Google Matrix; we cannot seem to break out of this reality that they have created for us where the only way to get information from the web is to search for it.
Search is just one way to get the information we are looking for. Currently, because of Google it (i.e. search) is probably the best way but there are other ways. One of the other way is the namesake of a Google competitor - Ask.
Before the Internet became such a big part of my life, even after that, and before Google became a ubiquitous tool for my life, my primary way of getting information was to ask my friends.
I still engage in asking. I use forums, email and instant messaging tools to ask people about stuff. However, I believe that asking as a form of getting information is not making good use of the very thing that Scoble claims will help defeat Google - the social graph.
Generally when people talk about using the social graph to get better information, they refer to how the interests, queries and results (those that are bookmarked, shared …) of the people in an individual’s social graph can provide better results for that individual’s search queries.
However, there are two other possible ways the social graph can be used to help an individual get information. The first way requires search - a search engine understands the social graph of a site like Facebook and helps us find the best person to ask the question to. This way is similar to how Google understood the web with structural analysis and PageRank - websites and people are the nodes; profiles are similar to content on the page; relationships and links are the edges.
This way of trying to use the social graph prevents us from seeing that the nodes of a social graph can be interacted with - after all, these nodes represent people. The second way I would suggest the social graph can be used does not need an algorithm to try to figure out who is the best person to ask a question because the nodes in the social graph already know that answer. So why not just ask the nodes?
The second way would be to just ask the people, who you are connected to, in the social graph (i.e. your ‘friends’) most likely to be able to answer your question. This question is the message. Your friends might not know the answer to that question but they probably might know a few people who do. What is needed in this second way is a mechanism to propagate that message easily through the social graph; each node redirecting a question to a few other nodes who might know the answer. The mechanism is able to keep track of the chains forming and finally send the answers back to the originating user and whichever other users along the chain interested in the answer.
I would probably not be too presumptuous to say that this way of using the social graph is already being done by most of us, albeit there isn’t some Web 2.0 site helping us do it. We simply do it by forwarding emails, smsing or calling friends who might know the answer to the query of another friend, or passing the contacts of people who might be able to help to a friend.
Just maybe, the obsession with Google is preventing the realization that there is another way to use the social graph to help us get information and hindering the development of tools to do that better.
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