Brij’s One More Idea

It hard to qualify initial Twitter Tweets related to serious topics as 'news'. Like for example this very first tweet announcing SoCal earthquake was made by Nicholas Hawkins. (Though there is bit of confusion on who actually broke the news).

holy shit earthquake in so cal

Now if you were reading this from public timeline on Twitter, you can potentially come up with two reactions. Laugh it off by saying this guy's apartment got hit by truck or take it seriously by thinking may be he is genuine and it's a first indicator of something serious.

Either case we don't have a quick way of verifying unless lot of people quickly retweet or validate via different sources. In the world of sub-minute information distribution, peer level validation is critical for random bits to be taken as news.

I think this sub-minute game is what makes Twitter interesting. And puts Google (and Reuters) in the legacy category (as far distribution velocity of news is concerned).

Rush to hit on SEND button is not unique to micro-blogging or for that matter blogging. We are witnessing video-game like rumor/excitement characteristic between introductory breaking news tweet (or blog post) and eventual validation tweet (or blog post).  What happens between these two phases is pretty much a citizen journalism equivalent of a roller coaster ride.

Time dimension is becoming increasingly important. We are in the sub-minute domain. Check out these two screens which compares how Twitter and Google covered LA earthquake news -

This is from Google News. I took both images with couple of seconds difference.

This using Twitter search (Summize)

Twitter has more chatter and gets better CPC (without the C off course). But you get the idea.

VentureBeat's blog post is 'first' on Techmeme. Not sure all this matters in the long run but just observing how news (and views) spread in early stage is fascinating.

News is followed by page view grab, and page view grab is followed by smart ad placements. That's where I think companies like MediaMath will play interesting role.

In any case Twitter beats Google on the sub-minute game.

Google has introduced Knol. At a high level this is a great initiative.  I hope this eventually becomes a better avenue for authority discovery and a repository for trusted content.

On the other hand.

Google is big,  they are making tons of money and crushing new companies faster than any other company out there. So let's bitch about it

Wikipedia is by far the most prominent result page on Google search engine. Google is sending traffic to Wikipedia in millions and nobody is making money in the process. Knol is a hedge against Wikipedia. Who knows what will happen to Wikipedia in 5 or 10 years? What if Yahoo starts offering voluntary top level Wikipedia link on every search result page. What if. Strange things have happened in the past. Oracle and IBM are biggest Linux supporters out there. Who thought that will happen one day. So Google has to keep Wikipedia on the content leash, if not link leash.

Google gives 75% to 80% of ad revenue to Adsense partners. That's a big leak when compared with 100% revenue they make on their own properties like search and gmail. If they can aggregate valuable content on their own property then they can keep lot of high margin revenue. Who knows better than Google what kind of content goes for higher bid on AdWords.

If you think, between Knol and YouTube, Google is not a content company then you probably think we are not in recession either.  Google became content company when on some blogs Google Adsense ad units started exceeding actual content.

So get used to the idea of creating, managing, and publishing content without ever leaving Google properties.

One good thing out of Knol is that Google search quality will dramatically improve. Internally in Google, this project is owned by search quality team. It's a wonderful way to get high quality, trusted content and in a verified structure (both explicit and implicit authority). They will use meta data tied with this content to address duplicate content issue, fighting spam etc.

Google is smart about perception management and appropriate to their target audience, they kept logo subdued and are avoiding Google name. Google brand name is not too directly associated with Knol. Plan is to sneak in geek friendly interface which can grow over time into a powerful reference knowledge repository. 

Interestingly current version is not linked with main search engine. Almost as a joke they have this text:

As if we are watching movie in slow motion.

Last couple of days I saw lot of bloggers turning sour on the state of Silicon Valley (by extension start-up ecosystem). Lot of this is credited to muddy macro picture. Yesterday's rare gasp by GOOG made some people go home early as well.

Om Malik has great analysis on why everybody should be worried now. Related to that is the Vallewag report on funding challenges faced by widget makers. Big hitter VC Kleiner Perkins is sending a big signal by pretty much leaving Web 2.0 market.

Now this is all cyclical and we will come out fine as overall economy shakes off current crisis. There is no denying the fact that lot of business models have added layers of froth and they need to trim down fast.

Ad revenue based online services, mobile applications, social media start-ups (and SaaS to some extent) will go through long slog before they are meaningful to mainstream consumers (and investors)? Deals are not happening fast enough and that has clogged the pipeline. It will take some time to clear up.

Also companies in Bay Area need to go global very fast. Google is now making majority of it's revenue from outside US (52% based on yesterday's call). There is only so much small company can do sitting here. They need to venture out and strike up partnerships and sign distribution contracts.

Markets are cyclical. Remember that.

[Photo courtesy Forklift]