the reflexions insider

The “prisoner’s dilemma” is an analogy in game theory that’s used to describe everything from crowd behavior to stock markets and employee group evaluations. One variation is this: you and an associate are each arrested and interrogated separately. The first to implicate the other will get a light sentence; the other is imprisoned indefinitely. If you implicate each other you both get a moderate sentence. But if you both stay quiet, you’re both let go. It’s about mutual trust and cooperation for a mutually beneficial outcome. If you look hard enough, economists and behavioral anthropologists will tell you, you’ll find it everywhere.

David Carr wrote an article in yesterday’s New York Times about why newspapers find themselves in this very predicament, but with a twist — there’s no way out unless they cooperate. Cooperating in this scenario would probably mean something like a subscription-based paid content model for a network of websites from large daily newspapers. If you pay the fee, you get unfettered access to all participating websites. If you don’t, you get very little (except what others might be willing to repost, a possible copyright issue lurking in the shadows of what has historically been a free and open [...]

Google is full of really smart people working on really hard problems. This is nothing new. Indeed the image of brilliant young engineers working on game-changing new products has come to define the company’s identity. What’s surprising to me is Google’s relative lack of significant innovation in recent years on its bread-and-butter product: search. Recent rumblings indicate that this may start to change.

The company is understandably hesitant to tinker with its core product, which some analysts estimate generates over 90% of its total revenue, especially given its most recent quarter which exceeded even the most optimistic expectations (in a recession, no less). But the sands are shifitng, and the sheer size of Google means it will be hard-pressed to compete with smaller, more nimble competitors who are starting to get attention, like Powerset and Twitter.

A recent article at Google Watch suggests that Google sees its future in the semantic web, a collection of standards and technologies that seek to deliver more meaning and structure to the web’s content but have largely languished due to a lack of widespread adoption. From the article, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is recently quoted as saying:

“Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in [...]

Consider this: Twitter didn’t exist three years ago. YouTube didn’t exist four years ago. And Facebook, the second most-visited website in the world on Christmas Day, 2008 (after Google), was started as a half-serious side project by Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room less than five years ago. All of these websites were effectively created after the (now oft reviled) term “Web 2.0″ was coined by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle in 2004.

By any standard, profitable or not, these are enormous web properties. And the timeline above demonstrates how rapidly the web landscape shifts and how fickle are its users.

Below I’ve identified several trends that I think will make an impact over the coming months and into 2010. This isn’t meant to be a “prediction” list per se, but an attempt at identifying how the current dynamics of social media will play out. Enjoy.

Twitter will launch a commercial subscription service that will generate revenue by letting companies use the platform to connect with customers. It will receive additional buyout offers but will remain independent for at least another year. I believe its investors are convinced that it’s worth more than their potential suitors think. And I believe they’re right. But having zero revenue is not sustainable.
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Cloud computing is all the rage these days. Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures gave an interesting talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC recently which covered some of the implications of cloud computing. At the Web 3.0 Conference there was a lively discussion about some of the more technical issues surrounding cloud computing, software as a service, and web architectures in general. Here are some of the points that were made:

A general rule of building out any system that needs to scale is to look at every layer in your system as a caching opportunity to minimize processing.

Start with clusterable technologies wherever possible.

The cloud has made “spinning up” instances of your application just an API call away. It’s extremely flexible and basically means you’ll (almost) never have to think about hardware again.

Amazon AWS is the leading cloud solution right now and is extremely flexible because it provides access to the HTTP layer. It’s becoming the Wal-Mart of cloud solutions and it’s price-optimized for CPU cycles.

IBM could become a major player in cloud computing over the next 2-10 years because of their history of mainframe architecture. The cloud is [...]

As just about everyone has already heard, Google has released its own open source web browser called Google Chrome. The open source community project is called Chromium. With a powerhouse like Google behind it, will this be a significant challenge to Internet Explorer and will it change how we use the internet? We won’t know for quite a while, but we can gain some insight by looking at Google’s motivation and the technologies they choose to incorporate.

With Mozilla’s Firefox being open source and having a few years of maturity behind it, why didn’t Google simply contribute code to the project?  One reason is Firefox’s focus on streamlining basic web browsing while Chrome’s focus is on richer web applications.  Google’s view of the web is one of increasingly complicated client-server applications.  They see a gradual paradigm shift in the internet, which they are happy to help grow, but which would require a web browser more dedicated to the task.

Another reason for starting from scratch might be one of control.  While it is open source, Chrome’s direction is effectively controlled by Google.  They are the primary developers and any project forks would get only a fraction of Google’s visibility with the public.  The [...]

About a month ago, those of us who follow changes in Google’s search result rankings with a level of enthusiasm usually reserved for sports franchises woke up to something frightening: The Dewey Update.

Google normally makes daily changes to their search result rankings, so finding yourself in position 3 when you were in position 4 yesterday is not abnormal. But it was quite shocking for many webmasters to wake up one morning and discover their site completely removed from Google’s search results.

Google’s primary goal should be to deliver the best (i.e., most relevant) search results to its users. This is what ensures that users will keep coming back and what maintains Google’s marketshare. However, the reasons behind this update (although impossible to pinpoint) appear to be focused on ranking Google’s internal pages higher than others.

After the update, Google Books search results were suddenly ranking close to the ever-dominant Wikipedia pages. In addition, Youtube and Google News content was being displayed prominently over other commercial listings. This looks like a blatant abuse of Google’s position. Their mantra “Do No Evil” implies a commitment to being fair and balanced—manipulating search results to put their own pages first is clearly an unfair tactic that hurts both users and webmasters.

Fortunately, this update was short lived. After Google’s spin master continue >>