Tim O'Reilly: What would Google do?
I did a podcast interview with Tim O'Reilly where he talks about how differently web 2.0 businesses manage data. He believes this is a key distinction between 1.0 and 2.0.
In a post on O'Reilly Radar, Tim expands on this idea and frames it in the context of asking what Google would do? It is worth reading the whole post as I believe this is one of the important differentiators between 1.0 and 2.0. It makes me think what enterprises can do in terms of exposing data and knowledge in the service of advancing talent and learning. For starters, I'd like to see a profiling system that is as rich and dynamic as the book page on Amazon. Dave Weinberger in his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, analyzes how much information surrounds one book in the Amazon database: distinctive phrases, frequency of buying, written reviews, tags, lists. Imagine if a profiling system automatically aggregated as much information and made it public about a person. Amazon does this in order to give me as many paths as it can to finding and buying this book. I need just as many paths to finding and connecting with the right people.
This is an area I'll be exploring over the next couple of months. If any of you have thoughts, please email them or post them as comments here.
Here are some excerpts from Tim O'Reilly's article: What Would Google (or Amazon) do?
Explore posts in the same categories: Main PageThey have huge data centers, tracking our every move, learning from our behavior and making decisions based on it. They deliver services to us, not products. They are indispensable to our daily lives. The latest crop of web 2.0 companies? How about our banks, insurance companies, and phone companies?
All of these companies have a great deal in common with Web 2.0 icons like Google, so perhaps it's more productive to think about how they are different. And one way that I've found to frame this difference is to ask the question: What would Google do? What would Google do if they were our bank or credit card company, with access to our every purchase, our bank balance, our history of paying late or early, our salary and our savings rate, our preferences for where we like to eat or shop?
What would Google do if they were our phone company, with access to our every phone call sent or received, how long we talk to Joe and how quickly we call Mary back? What would Google do if they ran our supermarket's loyalty card program, tracking our every purchase?It strikes me that one of the big differences between the 1.0 class of data aggregators and the 2.0 class is the difference between “back office” and “live” applications. The credit card company mines its database to select you for direct mail offers; it may even get close to real time in monitoring your card activity for fraud or credit limit detection. But Google or Amazon mines its database in real time and builds the results right into its customer-facing applications.
If Google or Amazon were your phone company, they'd give you access to your entire call history, not just your last ten phone calls. They'd build a dynamic address book for you based on everyone you'd ever talked to — and they'd build p2p phone number lookup from your friends right into that address book. They'd get rid of 411, and just help you search for what you need, and then make the connection for you.
This is one reason I think that Microsoft's term, “Live Software” is so right on. (I thought of naming this piece “Why Live Software is a better name than Web 2.0.”) It's unfortunate that Microsoft has chosen that name for its own products only, because it goes right to the heart of what makes Web 2.0 applications so interesting: they are alive, or as close to it as you can get with a computer. They learn from and interact directly with their users (and more specifically, provide services to individual users that benefit from the aggregate interaction of the system with all of its users.)
