Micro Persuasion.
think about easily searching content created by people you trust. That's huge and monetizable. This is where I see Friendfeed, Facebook and perhaps Google all headed. They will all build businesses around social contextual search advertising. Danny Sullivan calls this Search 4.0.
Social contextual search addresses Google's Achilles Heel - superfluous content. Right now when users scour the web they can't easily separate content they trust - i.e. what's been created by their friends - from everything else. It all gets piled into pages of indiscernible blue links that all compete for attention. However, if you can just search just what your friends think and prioritize it over everything else, you have a very powerful recommendation engine.
This is another step away from the 'mass' world that PR has inhabited for so long. Even searching via Google is a 'mass' activity because its rankings prioritise the popular sites which is not the same as prioritising the sites you or I might want to place our trust in.
It also moves further away from a model in which PR, advertising, marketing people work out what they want to tell you about their product or service and closer to a model where what the audience hears is filtered through large networks of people that they choose to listen to.
We have many thousands of sites where people rate things (eg travel sites) but we don't know these people, we don't their expertise, their preferences, values etc so using their recommendations can be quite problematic. When we do know them the recommendations become very powerful.
Of course, personal recommendation has always been extremely important but, again, the Internet is just making it much, much easier to find those recommendations and rely on them.
I think Google recognises the critical importance of this trend towards searching content created by people you trust. For instance, last week, Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google said in a Knowledge@Wharton interview:
I think, social is kind of a similar theme. Today, people think of
social as social networks - a set of sites that I go to where I
establish relationships with friends. And it's in the context of those
sites that I do stuff with them.
Our view at Google is that's a transitory phase in the development of
the whole social web, and that those friend relationships that you
create on these sites should be usable and portable and allow you to
get benefit no matter where you go on the web.
You can imagine a scenario where when I go to eBay and I am buying
something... Today, eBay uses user generated content as a way to do
reputations. So, I can see, "What are the reviews of this seller?" But,
it would also be nice to see, "Well, have any of my friends or friends
of friends actually reviewed that particular seller?"
I think Kraus would see Friendfeed as another site, part of the transition to a more powerful scenario where the whole web is one big friendfeed type application where you can access everything through the prism of your friends, colleagues, trusted commentators etc. For instance, under the Kraus model you might see a book you are thinking of buying. But you want some validation that it lives up to the publisher's blurb so you just search your social web to see if anyone you know has reviewed it, anywhere.
But, that's not all, a very big aspect of Friendfeed is that it throws up recommendations on stories etc it pushes content towards you. Some people are getting a lot of their news this way - another big cloud on the horizon for media sites.
Certainly, whatever the ultimate model, it's a very interesting and important development.
See also Neville Hobson on this topic.
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