A decade ago most of us were using AltaVista or something similar for search. No one was really complaining very much about the huge amount of spam and other noise that cluttered the results because we didn’t know there was a better way. Then Google came along with Page Rank, and had a profound effect on the quality of Internet search. Suddenly (and it really was that sudden), we couldn’t imagine going back to AltaVista and searching pages of results for the thing that Google gave us immediately.
For a good history of search, get John Battelle’s book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.
The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way.
Everything is decentralized, and no one is working to centralize stuff. I’ve got photos on Flickr, Posterous and Facebook (and even a few on MySpace), reviews on Yelp (but movie reviews on Flixster), location on Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, status updates on Facebook and Twitter, and videos on YouTube. Etc. I’ve got dozens of social graphs on dozens of sites, and trying to remember which friends puts his or her pictures on which site is a huge challenge.
And the amount of spam and just general nonsense that is flooding all of these services is crippling. As a user, I spend far too much time weeding it all out to find the few gems of real content from people I care about.
And I end up missing a lot of important content that I want to know about.
Someone will eventually help us make sense of all these various types of services, and help us separate the noise and spam from the real signal. I don’t know who’s going to do it, and I certainly don’t know how (if I did, I’d be doing it, not writing about it). But at some point soon, one of the Internet giants, or some new startup we’ve never heard of, is going to fix this mess for us.
I hope it comes sooner rather than later. Because social today looks a lot like search a decade ago. It’s broken, and just waiting for someone to fix it.
The search was a messier mess than this social mess.
Decentralized? is this the “Development Gap” issue?
“While still emerging, I think we’ll start to see successful examples of name build-out strategies that can bridge what I call the “development gap” – how to produce unique content and user experiences at scale across multiple domains,” President-Oversee.net
“Direct Navigation is Googles Achilles Heel”
http://dnjournal.com/cover/2010/january.htm
Somebody out there already owns this “Digital Promised Land”.
yayyyyyyy , My locator guy is back !
I’m not sure that centralization is the answer. It may help, but the core problem is that existing social networks have strayed away from the core idea of connecting you with your friends, and replaced that with the goal for you to have as many friends/followers/fans as possible.
And most of these new ‘friends’, followers and fans really don’t care about you, and you don’t care about them. But they still have the ability to create a tremendous amount of noise and spam on current services.
We should be able to easily filter based on our relationships to different people, but because of the current options of ‘friend / follower / fan’, we really can’t easily do that. What about ‘family’? Or ‘parents’, ’siblings’, ‘old girlfriends’, ’soccer team friends’, ‘work friends’, ‘industry colleagues’ etc.? In real life we tend to have many different groups of friends, each with their own ‘rules’.
The old facebook that allowed you to be completely private and encouraged you to only ‘friend’ your true friends really did a great job to address the groups of friends we generally think of as ’school friends’. But it was a huge mistake for them to allow new groups of people onto the site without updating their system to easily allow people to properly classify and filter them.
That has led to the current situation where now all our friends are jumbled together in a big mess. One of these days we’ll find a good solution to this problem. Until then, we’ll just have to make do with what we have.
and above all Facebook is not the answer….
If FB is not the answer, and twitter is a real social-mess infested by bots.. Then what’s the remedy?
Something tells me that the first company who will give the solution for this issue, will be reaping the gift-horse from the netizens…
Decentralizing social networking is the only way to go. I’m building and testing a solution now that works on shared hosting environments(PHP) and will be open-source so anyone can use it, called 6d. Basically you have your own site and domain and when you make a post you get to pick if it’s public or only goes to your friends (other people that have a 6d site). It’s set up for plugins too so you could still have a facebook and twitter plugin if you want, but I think eventually you’ll just be able to use your 6d site for everything. Think email over http. I’ve got 6 different sites using the framework now that I can pass messages back and forth to. Louis Gray or Michael Arrington feel free to email me if you’d like a demonstration sometime.
FriendFeed and other aggregators tried to solve those issues, and did in some ways, but also presented their own noise, with likes, comments, etc, not to mention the requirement to have people registered in order for their data to be searchable.
Now, it seems people, for the most part, don’t want the aggregators. Facebook is making inroads there, but the updates from 3rd party services themselves seem noisy, and it’s likely most will choose 2-4 services to focus. Not all friends will agree. Some sites will die, and the big guys will win, even if they aren’t the best.
I remember Friendfeed.
I don’t think the answer is evolution of existing services, the strong survive, etc. I think there will be disruption. At least I hope there will be. I don’t think the best answer is simply that Facebook owns it all. And that doesn’t deal with the spam/noise issue at all.
Agree, the service that will make your social again good for the soul will have to have a totally different approach, when back in the times we had, “Oh no, not another search engine” we now have, “Oh no, not another aggregator/social network” – the change will have to be profound!
If you and I had a solution for spam/noise/search/social, we’d have plenty of VC and others would be writing about us.
There are tools like my6sense which practically eliminate spam and highlight relevancy in RSS and Twitter on an individual level (I am an advisor, blah blah), and Twitter lists help to find high quality people, but spam and noise follows every network. If the bad guys can find value being there, they will eventually get there.
Someone needs to do to Facebook what Google did to Yahoo! The challenge is that Facebook already did the disrupting to MySpace, so user switching propensity may be low for a new player.
I’m curious what kind of spam annoys you the most on these services. Advertisements, promotional stuff, affiliate “free ipod” posts, or simply chatter that’s not relevant to you?
I guess the key distinction I’m curious about is if you see the problem as spam (content that should not exist) or noise (content that doesn’t interest you)? I think the solution spaces for these two problems are relatively distinct.
(disclaimer: I work on anti-spam tech at Facebook.)
All the ads are spam. Knock down one new phone / credit card ad and up pops another one. They have never been event remotely relevant to me so it is just spam.
The noise is the constant updates from my friends playing Scrabble and every time they score a point in Dante’s Inferno. I can only see this getting worse. Then there is the constant recommendations, if I haven’t wanted to add person X to my friends list in over a year why are you still suggesting them.
Lite is an improvement but guess what, I still don’t want another phone!
Facebook will own it until they don’t own it I,e. Ali
Very insightful Mike. I totally agree. I expect you would have had the same sentiment above if you wrote this article about general search in 1998 or 1999. People would have assumed Yahoo is the answer. FB today = Yahoo in 1999…strong portal that gets huge amounts of page views. But the internet has shown that people care about filtering. Curation is critical because eventually our small web of information becomes too big to manage. And spam just makes it worse. Eventually our curated social network starts looking more and more like the general web as our social graphs become larger. The choice is reducing overload by reducing friends but then you also reduce breadth of information. This paradox becomes frustrating and the only resolution is disruption that makes it manageable. Great article!
Seesmic will
I feel that the whole social movement lacks context. Meaning that as users we’re just bombarded with info regardless of our interest. Afterall, isn’t that what spam is? Although there are many portals I think if a medium comes along that can direct content more appropriately by interest then a lot of the problem will be solved.
I have the same problem. Friend feed is a way but most of them dont use it.
Not only their social profiles on different sites, but also their phone number, different instant messenger user-names (msn, aim, yahoo, google), phone numbers, twitter name and a lot more. Plaxo is a good way to organize the addressbook but it has its own downside.
i find two or three email address if i want to email a friend. I end up emailing all of them. I know it is a PIA for them and for me too.
>I’ve got photos on Flickr, Posterous and Facebook
So true, I think that 2010 will be the year of social networks mashups, to avoid us to waste so much time.
Startups already exists and have launched such websites : Pictarine is a photo mashup to get in one place your photos from Flickr, Facebook and Picasa (http://www.pictarine.com)
If we assume that online social networks are meant to imitate, or at least be patterned, after our real life social networks I feel as if the noise and spam is an innate part of what it means to be social.
When you’re at a party with your friends you don’t get immediate access to the best pieces of gossip right away nor do you hear everything rumor. That’s just how social news works, at least in real life.
To want online social media to be perfected I feel it would remove the essential human aspect of it. No longer social but something a little bit too much metallic.
Hi Michael,
The solution is puzzling, many sites are trying to pull it all back together, but even in this area of collation there is still too much noise.
It’s interesting to watch how the landscape of social interaction is changing… we’re slowly learning that not everyone wants to know every thing we do. We’re learning to give out more valuable, share-able information that benefits others.
I feel we’re moving back towards some balance point, where we’re not so focussed on ’socialising’ online, and more so using the online social networks to establish, support and maintain our real-life social connections…
Anthony.
Its exactly the reason I started using Pibidi. I can make plans and see what my friends are doing back in the real world without all the noise and irrelevant information that I didnt need to know in the first place
I have the solution =) but I won’t tell… not yet anyway
Is your solution something like the twitter match in urljar.com? Even that seems not working with twitter’s barring of access to their user data.
The problem is clear.
The technology is out there.
There is a need for a solution.
Start-up’s, tech-co’s…this is your chance.
It’s not a one man’s job, otherwise I would have done it myself also
PS: my solution for now is to not the use too much (different) social sites at all…
I’ve previously summarized this as a need for squelch. I’ll likely continue to call it that as well. Because, that’s what were talking about above the noise.
What’s unclear is if squelch can be a company or is simply an eventual refinement that we come to take for granted. I’d bet on the unlikely places such as Slashdot, DIGG, and mature communities where karma and social weighting has made it into the code (even if limited or ham-fisted at times).
Social Weighting and Reputation Score will be key, and a pre-req of a lot of that is identity management. Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Google, have a leg up there…
One interesting side effect is that if someone nails down a way to clean up social like search was a decade ago is that most users are expectant of very low account barriers to entry. We are tired of multiple log ins, and a product like facebook connect tries to solve this.. but keeps it sticky.
Obviously a revenue model of targeted advertisements like Google does with AdWords could prove to be extremely valuable because it could deliver on what is happening right now as opposed to long thought out pieces of content. However, with a passive layer of access would this leave such a web product open to competition and diminish returns that a monetization model could produce long-run?
Hey. Google search isn’t exactly perfect. Sure page rank may yeild results on topics you are searching for, but I constantly find useless results dating back years that are of no help to me at all.
If only there was a plugin/optimisation so google brought back results based on recency of dates created/posted I would be a happt man. Just sick of wading through out of date articles that provide limited value.
Select “show options” on results page – last day/week/year/specific range
search = u go to information
social = information comes to you
the world needs sensible bloggers like @arrington and a “personal social delivery engine”
Why do our social lives need to be a business?
We go to work to earn money. Work has always been different to who we are socially. Those of us who work do not need money from our social lives, that is the point of our social lives, they are not about money.
Social media makes being social like work. Too much work for Mike, but the answer is not new social media it is no social media.
The term itself is spin. It is not social media. There is no such thing. There is media, a business, and there is social, which is being human.
Michael & Louis,
Don’t you think that part of the noise is due to the number of accounts you (and I) have? You said yourself that you probably have a dozen social graphs when you tally everything up.
How does an average user stack up to that? Mainstream users seem to be cutting down on the noise by simply cutting down on where they hang their hat. Friends and family? Facebook. Photo lovin’ fool? Flickr or Smugmug. Most other services pale in comparison to the number of active users these big guys get.
Or am I missing the point?
No, you’re not. They are, by mistaking we (tech addicts) for them (‘normal people’)
Adam; The noise is irrelevant to the number of accounts.
It’s true that the problem today is primarily being experienced by early adopters, however not due to the excess of accounts, but due to the stream evolution – data consumption from web browsing has transcended into stream consumption.
When you analyze the parameters of stream evolution you will discover that the firehose problem will very quickly become an issue for regular users as well. Take for example Twitter/FB status updates: The amount of followers or friends on both platforms has increased dramatically within the past year, and so has the content generated from each stream/friend.
We create the mess, and expect someone to fix it for us.
That being said, there IS a mess, and the solution is in those services that allow us to manage muliple identities in one place.
For example, I’m not a fan of Facebook (although I have to use it because many of my friends are there), but FB Connect, Open ID and emerging similar services enable you to log into multiple sites with just one identity.
Meebo is also helpful. With one login, I can see all my IM friends from Yahoo, Hotmail, Facebook, Google and MyScpace in one place. Very convenient.
Life IO (profiled on TC) is a service to integrate all your e-mail, social networks, RSS feeds, IM identities and contacts in one place. A bit messy in implementation, but a good idea to have one life portal where everything is centralised.
The optimum solution of course, would be to have only one service which not only does everything you want to do (manage media, personal updates, subscription updates and contacts), but seamlessly integrates with a,ll other services chosen by other people. This is why e-mail was the web’s killer app: you could choose your email provider, but knew you could e-mail people who used other providers.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t exist yet. Google has Gmail, GoogleReader and Picassa, but Docs sucks compared to Office, Gtalk doesn’t communicate with MSN and Yahoo, and Google doesn’t host personal videos well (the recent Gdrive update basically sucks).
I use Windows Live because I get e-mail, IM, photo and document storage from one place. With Office Web, I’ll be able to manage pesonal documents as well. But of course, I can’t comunicate with friends on Facebook or Twitter or read RSS feeds within Windows Live.
Hopefully time will fix this as all providers improve features and become seamlessly interconnected.
https://www.lifeio.com/login.cgi
Email is based on open standards and protocols which allows lots of service providers interop with lots of different applications and each other.
Search is different, its not about communication. Social networks are more like email than search apps. Maybe social networks would benefit from old fashioned standardised protocols?
Plaxo tried, but Facebook pretty much killed them. Facebook isn’t ceding any of their control of (i.e. access to) their graph, so it’s either them or nobody for the forseeable future.
Michael; The only answer to the today’s noise problem is hyper personalized streams – A very simple solution that will know how to intuitively and personally filter the thousands of information nuggets coming our way.
This tool can only work if it serves up content based on our true consumption behavior, with the ability to detect the finest nuances of each and every one of our personal preferences. This type of tool will not only know how to rank our content, but provide us with a serendipitous experience, delivering information that surprisingly, interests us.
As Louis Gray mentioned, this is what we’re doing here at my6sense (www.my6sense.com)
Beyond the solution that we provide in order to address the overload challenge, to quote CNN: “The iPhone app is interesting in its own right, but more interesting perhaps is what it suggests about the future…” – http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/03/content.overload/index.html
Or what Brian Solis wrote on it in his Predictive Web post – http://www.briansolis.com/2010/01/the-predictive-web/
Michael; Imagine you can offer your TC readers a personalized stream that will surface the articles that interest them, based on relevance. this will ensure that each reader never misses out on the specific insights that he wants and needs to see.
Barak Hachamov,
Founder, my6sense
Waiting for Mike’s response on this comment.
This is exactly where we are heading.
Between the mobile smart phone platforms, voice recognition so your not typing or txting while your driving, gps, & real time search.
Products like the smart phones and the iPads new space creation will enable users to totally customize exactly what they see and hear!
http://Siri.com is an iPhone app that takes voice and 50 independent apis to deliver exactly what the user is looking for!
In those api’s are the most relevant items to deliver the best recommendations to the user.
All of the people making useless noise won’t have anyone listening because no one will be tuned into them!
Your able to set a lot of these filters yourself at your individual accounts just like Twitter lists.
The next company like Google will be the company that aggregates all of this noise for you. Kind of like search on steroids through a voice command.
No this new company will not take over google either this will be a whole new space or mashup.
This will not compete with standard search, rather google will compliment this new hybrid.
This stuff is coming and it’s really exciting, its the Internets next giant leap forward!
Smart phones and Apples iPad & the iPad competitors are the exact platforms that will plug into all of these api’s and give you the filters that you are looking for!
Just my two cents!
Steven
You have certainly identified a need for a central platform Mike so why not you assemble a team to plan and launch such service????
Because it’s worthless and not needed, just like Friendfeed.
Cause the team would just steal it and say Arrington had nothing to do with the idea even though he first posted about it and set them up an office and such.
I think “Barak Hachamov” shared a very interesting idea that TC readers a personalized stream that will surface the articles that interest them, based on relevance…
And nowadays all social sites becoming the house of spammers…
we need to think of the root cause and i think this is because it is the need of online business…
Isn’t it!!!!
maybe that’s what Google social search is all about
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/search-is-getting-more-social.html
Dave Winer calls it two-way search
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/02/03/googlesTwowaySearchIsGoodF.html
You’re blasting your location to three different services and use a two-digit number of social networks? I don’t think that it’s the system thats “broken”.
And: what spam?? You follow people and only see these people’s status update. No spam. However, you are probably following everybody back who follows you first, right? I noticed that people do that on Twitter to “collect followers”. wtf.
Only follow or friend those people you care to get updates about! All others can drop you a mail when they’ve something to say. Period.
Again, I don’t think that the system is the problem here.
The system is broken only to early adopters. Most of these services will never cross the chasm because most services are useless to average joes. Or, from tech community perspective: average joes are too dumb to realize how great these services are.
What we see, is perhaps the proliferation of service/platform/aggregator within a small subset of community. A bubble with all of its perceived problems, yet doesn’t exist in the real world.
And the bubble keeps inflated as tech communities are feeding on each other with their outrageous valuation. Come to think of it, we’re just like two Icelandic investment bankers trading each other’s pet at billion-dollar valuation.
The answer is in the form I’m using to write this comment. It’s called Facebook Connect. Because the thing is that most people aren’t like you Mike. They don’t have accounts on all of the sites & services you mention.
They (at least in the ‘western world’, whatever that means) have a Facebook account, and not a lot else. And they can use that to log in to just about everything they need to, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
an indian attempt to change things.
chk this out
http://www.ptinews.com/news/504780_Searching-information-on-net-made-easy
cool experience, never seen before on web. An intelligent blending of features like wiki, search, bookmarking, networking, blogging, twitter etc to change search model
Webjam used as a social media hub, enables companies to see all all their social media channels in a single dashboard. So tracking becomes easier, especially used with tailored analytices.
However if you meaning what the mood is, or what the hot topics are, each network is already doing a pretty good job for free aren’t they?
If you are a talking about tracking brand reputation, then there are plenty of Buzz marketeers who can measure that for you too surely?
Webjam can be used as a social media hub, that allows organisation to see all all their social media channels via a single dashboard. So tracking is easier, especially used with tailored analytics. But if you mean to see what the hot topics are, each network does a pretty good job don’t they? If you mean tracking brand reputation, then there are plenty of Buzz marketeers who can measure that for you too surely?
Nah, fix it? The thing is, a network based economy with huge fixed cost but close to zero marginal costs with network externalities to boot is primed for monopolies. Microsoft ended up as a (more or less) monopoly player. Google has in search. Facebook when it comes to online social networks based on your real life friends (in most countries). These are not accidents, there are simply no room for two or more players.
This is the tragedy of the online economy. We have to endure monopolies. I suspect the “fix” for social is the same as it was for search and for desktop OSes: one player will grab a sufficient market share to press the other actors out by nature of network externalities. And trust me, once one manages this, they will not open up to others unless forced to.
Interesting points. However …
How do you explain Myspace or Yahoo getting replaced by FB or G?
Immature markets. And there were things about the business model of Facebook that attracted a certain kind of user, as well as some sociological effects (there are still people on MySpace, but they tend to be from different social circles than those on Facebook, reinforcing the point on network externalities. Oh, and look up Digital Ghetto/White Flight).
Thanks for pointing out the “Digital Ghetto.” I sensed this de facto segregation in the online social space (I have prejudice against Myspace and, perhaps, its users) but I had no idea there was a term for it and a dissertation written on the subject – http://www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf.
Arrington, is it really that much work for you to check your frequently active sites? The real question here is why do you even have fifty different account on these sites if you don’t have the patience to actively be a part of them. I don’t sign up for services, just because they are something new. I sign up for them because I intend on using them. If you require some type of stupid aggregation service just to view these sites, then maybe we should look at the sites themselves and question their methods of giving you information. Why would anyone want to centralize all of their information with everyone elses? How would they make their information unique from the rest of the mess?
Facebook with “Friendfeeders inside” will solve this for us.