Hagia Sophia's Web 2.0 Inspiration

While I was in Istanbul showing the fabulous Hagia Sophia to my daughters, two piece of Web 2.0 news kept colliding in mind long enough to end up resulting in two unusual conclusions.  The first piece of news is the $900M Google - Myspace deal and the second is AOL releasing user search keyword info. 

The Google Myspace deal is very interesting in two fronts.  First, it underlines another way web services can monetize.  It's basically this; get the users attention (eyeballs), and the more they see your pages, the more they will do searches off your site and searches are monetizable.  In 1999 these eyeballs could not be monetized by the searches they do.  Today they can, and that's significant.  Another interesting thing about this deal is that video is not part of it.  This is surprising because one would think it is a golden chance for Google to get their video product into Myspace as opposed to Youtube which is being blocked.  Puzzling isn't it?  It gets better.  Assuming most Youtube traffic comes from Myspace, this makes one think whether Myspace has other ideas about Youtube.  Is a big deal pending?  We will have to wait and see.

The second very interesting piece of news was AOL releasing anonymous user search keywords.  Even though AOL said it was a tiny bit of the total searches, the amount of information one can glean from them is staggering.  If you look at the data, it doesn't take long before you realize what an invaluable source of information this is.  Take user 1338 for example.  He searched for: John Cogliandro, John Cogliandro Virginia, Charles Cogliandro, Anna Cogliandro, army life insurance policy, uss san francisco, atomic bomb tehran, syria baath party 1967, fat guy, obesity... the list goes on.  There are hundreds of keywords other than these, but with only a handful, we can almost figure out who he is, where he lives what he did and who his family is.  Imagine what you can know about 1338 if you knew thousands of his keywords over time about.  One needs to pause and think what kind of a knowledge base Google, Yahoo, MSN have amassed about our society.  Can they even predict the future?

Yes they can.  Yahoo and Google said so at the AlwaysOn conference.  They can do that based on the relative frequency of search queries that relate to something that's imminent in the future.  This kind of data is way too valuable for one company to own, which brings me to my final point.  Shouldn't Google be regulated, and this information be organized and universally accessible?  It should. 

Here is the funny part.  How do you regulate a company named Google, with a  colorful logo that children love, with the motto "don't be evil" whose campus looks like a playground of happiness, with founders that look like grad students?

Wouldn't it be easier if they were named "Strategic Information Resources Inc. (SRI)", housed in a tall black shiny building with levels and levels of security to get into, run by a guy that looks like Dick Chaney.  Then you can say "this information needs to be made open to the public" more forcefully.  With a name like Google you can't. 

Who would have thought their name would be their competitive advantage (as if they don't have enough :-) ?

This is why vacations are necessary.  You come back with all sorts of crazy ideas.

Comments

[Cem Sertoglu]

Goes to the point that we'd discussed a while back, about the value of one's clickstream. I think the ultimate owner of that information should be the user herselfs, and it should be her prerogative to release select chunks of it to her service providers to increase the efficiency of her experience online.

[Robert Tsai]

Baris,
I enjoyed reading your analysis of the Google-MySpace deal. I'd welcome your and your reader's thoughts on a poll I put together on my blog on whether this was a good deal:

http://zenrob.typepad.com/zenrob/2006/08/googles_900_mil.html