DOING THE INTERNET MIND-MELD
This post is about two unrelated topics: 1) How Google is potentially disrupting Microsoft, Yahoo! and others with Google Maps and other initiatives, and 2) How the boundaries between public and private is shifting in Web 2.0. Stay with me, it'll hopefully make sense, as we go from the trees into the forest.
In a post a few days ago on Google's potential moves with Google Base, I mused:
"Perhaps a Google vs. eBay/Amazon/Yahoo!/Microsoft/AOL coalition re-alignment may be in our future."
Well, we're on Internet/Web 2.0 time here I guess.
Microsoft's ambassador to the blogging world Robert Scoble in a post today suggests to Yahoo!'s "Scoble" Jeremy Zawodny (of course that would make Scoble Microsoft's "Zawodny") that:
"Jeremy, if we were really smart, we’d start working together with others in the industry to build our own, open, attention API, that we’d agree not to monetize (at least for a decent length of time) and that we’d get everyone to play in. In other words, if we were smart we’d join the Attention Trust. If we could do that then we could disrupt Google."
He continues,
"...we’re at another juncture in the industry like that. We have maybe a couple of years to do something different and weird. Something that Google isn’t expecting. Can Yahoo trust Microsoft? Can Microsoft trust Yahoo?
And, can the two of us trust eBay or AOL? Can eBay or AOL trust Yahoo or Microsoft? Now you know just how hard this will be. Google is building something that’s gonna disrupt all of us.
We all individually have advantages. But it’ll take some clear thinking, some good relationship work cross-company (and, internally at Microsoft cross-group, which really is almost as hard as cross-company work anyway)."
This post is a follow-up to an earlier post by Scoble on how Google potentially disrupts Microsoft and Yahoo! most definitely and AOL, Amazon and eBay most probably (see here and here in chronological order). Specifically, Scoble is talking about how Google's initiatives on Internet maps may be disruptive vis a vis what Microsoft and Yahoo! are doing. A brief summary of key quotes:
"Has Google disrupted the businesses of Yahoo and Microsoft? Yes! It got me out of bed to write this post..."
"To see how you don’t need to look any further than the rejuvenated mapping world..."
"Hint: Yahoo and Microsoft’s employees need to get this.
What do they need to get?
That it’s not about maps, it’s about the advertising platform that Google has built. It’s not about prettiness, it’s about who has the most user generated content (I still hate that term)..."
"So, what can we do to disrupt Google?
"Disruptive!"
The issues being discussed in the original post (Google's moves on the Internet mapping front vs. Microsoft and Yahoo!'s efforts) are important and noteworthy (and probably the subject of a future post by yours truly). And it illustrates how competitive innovation can really be.
But for now, I'm just shaking my head at how the world has changed in terms of Internet competition over the last decade.
In Web 1.0, these types of conversations would be conducted in private meetings and/or at conference-type events. Occasionally, one would see an article and/or editorial in a trade publication on who should do what with whom.
In web 2.0, some of these conversations occur in public, via blogs, with the lively participation of anyone who cares to comment. Not that the private conversations don't occur, but the fact that they're being supplemented by public participation is an noteworthy wrinkle.
It brings to mind this other, unrelated story this week on a new survey that indicates that more teenagers than ever are eschewing private journals and diaries for public blog journals, sharing their teen trials and tribulations with millions of their closest friends. As a USA Today story noted this week,
"At least 8 million teens blog, according to Intelliseek. The Pew Internet & American LifeProject, which plans to release a report on teens and blogging on Wednesday, estimates 4 million teen bloggers.
Those statistics were collected a year ago, and the numbers might be higher if you factor in not just blogs but the world of social websites, especially the booming MySpace, a hybrid site that allows people to post their personal interests, write blogs, put up video and set up ways to communicate with their friends. That site has exploded to 34 million users in just two years — and is dominated by 14- to 34-year-olds."
It's taking a much shorter time than expected for early adopters amongst the technorati and teenagers to lower their privacy guard, to go from a mind-set of protecting one's secrets, to sharing their joys, hopes and fears with the world, and to be convinced, hopefully or not, that the returns outweigh the risks.
It's a big behavioral change that's occurring and the real mainstream has yet to follow over the next few years. Reminds me of the old adage that the best place to hide may be in a crowd after all.
To paraphrase Scoble:
Disruptive!
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