Google’s like a newspaper, and not in a good way

This morning I got some coffee at Starbucks. While I was there, I vaguely remembered that there something interesting about the new iPhone and Starbucks’ relationship, but I couldn’t recall the details.

No problem, I’ll Google it.

As you can see, there was a problem: Google’s results are stale.

I gave Search.Twitter.com a shot, and got my answer instantly.

Oh yeah. That’s right. The new iPhone OS 3.0 automatically logs you into Starbucks’ wifi. Thanks, Twitter.

When I hear the classic “Why would anyone care what I had for lunch?” complaint, or “How is Twitter ever going to make money?” I tend to counter with examples like this, and point out that the site is generating real value, and that they could turn on any number of a dozen clumsy paths to cash tomorrow if they were in a hurry (which they’re not).

Let’s go a step further: in the hysterical Daily Show bit aired last week (that I first saw on Scott Orn’s blog), Jason Jones posed the question to Rick Berke, the New York Times’ Assistant Managing Editor: “Why is aged news better than real news?” It’s not hard to draw a parallel between Google and newspapers. The three common defenses of traditional newspapers are:

1. Blogs are largely about commentary, and the commentary is based on content originally gleaned from newspapers. Without newspapers, blogs wouldn’t have content
2. Bloggers won’t ever be on the ground covering wars or doing hard hitting investigative journalism the way a salaried newspaper employee can. Without newspapers, a lot of the work it would take to uncover the news simply wouldn’t be done.
3. Bloggers don’t have editors. They can’t be trusted.*

All three of those defenses are largely true, but don’t address the core problem: Newspapers are still valuable, just not nearly as much as they used to be, because their information is old. The same is true of Google.

Google has an offline version of the entire internet, indexed, and ready to speedily return search results. The cost and intellectual energy associated with keeping up that offline internet must be staggering, and keeping it updated must be a challenge that grows harder every day. That being said, the world is asking for it’s news faster and faster. I’m happy to roll the dice with Twitter search results, clicking sketchy shortened links and triangulating opinions by looking to see if 3-4 people have said the same thing. That’s better than getting irrelevant, year-old news from Google.

Few people are rooting for the demise of newspapers. I heard someone suggest the other day that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal should become non-profits. We need their output, and if it can’t be produced profitably, maybe we should all pitch in. Many people contribute to public television because they prefer its content to major networks that are forced to cater to sweeps week. If Google loses its status as a cash machine, and their innovation slowed, we’d all suffer, too.

Is it such a stretch, though, that, in 5-10 years time, we could be asking Eric Schmidt: “Why are aged search results better?”

* Particularly funny for me, as my earliest memory of an impactful newspaper article was one describing, in detail, the house I was living in at the time. To my naïve surprise, every detail in the was not only inaccurate, but made up out of thin air. If your first memory of a newspaper article was a spiteful list of lies about your house, how much would you mourn the loss of the newspaper industries treasured editors?

Zuckerberg ‘05 talk fascinating in hindsight

Thanks so much, Matt Koidin, for tipping me off to Zuckerberg’s talk at Stanford from 2005 (opens iTMS).

The points I found most interesting were:

• His quote that “Language is an inefficient form information transfer”, and as a result he encourages community at his company to fill the gaps in communication
• He got excited about another idea after he’d coded Facebook and had it up for a while. He almost ditched Facebook. His idea was a web app that scraped AIM for away messages. This was the genesis for Twitter (and Facebook status updates), and he not only articulated the value of such a site back in ‘05 (before Twitter was created), but believed it had nearly as much inherent value as Facebook. It’s hard to overstate how prescient was.
• When asked why he was uniquely qualified to lead Facebook, he detailed his programming credentials, then said “In terms of management, though, I have no idea what I’m doing.”

Two academic takes on Twitter

Two of my favorite HBS profs recently wrote great blog posts on Twitter. With all that’s been written lately about Twitter, I wouldn’t have thought there was much more to say until we sat on the subject a while, and watched it develop further, but these profs found new takes.

1. Here’s Prof. Andy McAfee’s. I like the idea that Twitter’s value lies in its doing “17 things we already did”.
2. Here’s Tom Eisenmann’s. It hadn’t occurred to me that the various uses for Twitter created a marketing challenge, but I think the professors right that, if one use has to “win”, Twitter is more likely to become a communication tool among friends than a celebrity micro-blogging tool (although it’s not clear to me why one has to win).

The only thing I have to add to this conversation is that there seems to be tension between a common desire to create content and time/hassle associated with creating the content. Many folks would love an outlet for expression, but can’t or don’t want to spend the time. Now that the time required to contribute to Twitter is so minimal, we’ll start hearing from folks we wouldn’t have in the past (which explains the popularity among celebrities).

The twist, in my mind, is that good content is still the result of time spent. Making posting easier is great, but only if the posts are valuable to someone. In order for a person to be “worth” following going forward (meaning that they’re posting frequency to value ratio is acceptable) they’ll have to fall into 1 of 3 categories:

1. Impressive people - Your writing doesn’t have to be that interesting if what you’re describing is inherently interesting. For example, if an artist spends hundreds of hours on a painting, he doesn’t have to spend very long on his “tweets” about the painting, because the hard work I’m benefiting from was accomplished in advance.
2. Clever people - Someone like Merlin Mann clearly puts a lot of thought into each of his 140 character posts. It’s almost irrelevant that his writing is so short, because I still have to think about a lot of what he writes for a while. This is also true of the comedic contributors, like Tim Siedell.
3. Close friends and family (The exception) - I’m willing to let folks in my circle slip a little, but if a family member frequently posted minutiae even I found boring, they’d eventually be “too expensive” to follow.

In each case, Twitter is new and useful. Impressive people used to be filtered through media. Clever people didn’t have this micro-blogging medium until recently. And friends and family have a new way to stay in touch, between long phone calls or in-person visits.

In summary, because we all have friends and family, we’ll always have an audience, but cultivating a big audience will still require punching the clock, even if it’s 140 characters at a time.