Social Search, Part 2

This is Part 2 of a response to a panel presentation at Xerox PARC I attended earlier this week called "Beyond Search." In Social Search, Part 1, I talked about Netflix, Live365, and Pandora, and the various ways they use the Long Tail in order to do business online, providing films and music to people that they might not otherwise discover.

Kevin Rose from Digg and Joshua Schachter from del.icio.us, on the other hand, get information from their users that they provide to everyone else. Digg is all about users filtering news stories, del.icio.us about users tagging pretty much anything online. While the other three companies all try to find out in detail what their users like, Digg and del.icio.us exist only to voice their users' opinions: here the Long Tail speaks for itself.

In short, Digg and del.icio.us depend directly upon "the wisdom of crowds," in James Surowiecki's phrase. Netflix, Live365, and Pandora, by contrast, leverage some of that same "wisdom" when they can, but analyze it carefully in order to target individuals and small groups within the crowd--the Long Tail. All five companies depend upon the capabilities of the Web to rapidly communicate with and receive communications from massive numbers of people.

Also, unlike the other three companies, Digg and del.icio.us don't have a product. They are the product, a fact born out by Yahoo's acquisition of del.icio.us. Interestingly, the Xerox PARC audience had nothing to ask about the acquisition--there were a few glancing comments about it, I believe. (If anyone has a differing observation, please let me know.)

And all five companies indeed produce something "beyond search," something that at its best feels like collective wisdom; at its worst, something that feels like mob voices. Digg is particularly vulnerable to charges that it can constitute a mob; the wikipedia page on Digg, which contains the annotation "the neutrality of this article is disputed," levels such charges. Near the end of the q-and-a period that followed the panel presentations, some folks in the audience also questioned the value of the crowd "wisdom," on the principle of "garbage in, garbage out."

All this being said, what does any of it have to do with identity and reputation? Well, as it turns out, I'll need Part 3 to talk about these questions. And I promise to do so.

Technorati Tags: Digg, del.icio.us, wisdom of crowds, wikipedia, Xerox PARC