Last summer during our DMI summerschool I worked with Vera Bekema, Liliana Bounegru, Andrea Fiore, Simon Marschall, Sabine Niederer, Bram Nijhof, Richard Rogers and Elena Tiis on a project titled ‘The Nationalities of Issues: Rights Types.’

We looked at the most significant rights types per country according to local Google results of the query for “rights” in the local languages. Graphic designer Vera Bekema and I visualized the results and the project was published in the Global Information Society Watch 2009.

Download the pre-print PDF with the original blue colors or the GISwatch purple edition.

Facebook seems to have overtaken Google as the number one entry point to the web according to the new Hitwise data. Even though they serve two different purposes (searching versus social networking in its broadest sense) it marks an important turning point for the increasingly central role of the social web:

Starting with the web means to start with Google as ”the start page for the Internet” (Dodge, 2007) becae “Google has become such a commonly used resource that people are beginning to regard it as synonymous with the Web.” (Searls in Gudrais, 2007) (Helmond 2008: 22)

The web has always been social, with ‘Web 1.0′ systems and software like e-mail, mailinglists, fora, IRC and ICQ but Social Software and the social web is typically associated with Web 2.0 platforms that enable one-t0-many broadcasts and publications to many-to-many. The social web is taking over from the information web as the starting point of the web.

via the Next Web.

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

I just finished reading What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis and was rather disappointed. I saw Jeff Jarvis speak at the Next Web 2009 and he is an excellent speaker and certainly knows how to entertain his audience with stories. However, as a writer I am not so impressed. The book is filled with numbers and figures of revenue, clicks, marketshare etcetera. On top of that it doesn’t read like a coherent argument.

Jeff Jarvis at The Next Web 2009

Please note that this is not a book review but a collection of notes of everything that I got out of this book for my research. I tried a new notetaking system for my research: Evernote. Instead of underlining passages I took pictures of relevant paragraphs with my Google phone, the Nexus One (the pictures in this blog post are taken with my Nikon D90) and directly uploaded them to Evernote. Evernote makes my notes available everywhere and it applies text recognition to everything that I upload so my pictures become searchable.

Evernote text recognition

Life is a beta

In both the Perceived Freshness Fetish and Identity 2.0 I describe the web 2.0 culture as a beta culture. I would like to argue that web 1.0 was always ‘Under Construction’ while web 2.0 is always ‘In Beta.’ The main difference is the disruption of the updates for the user or visitor. Websites that are ‘Under Construction’ are unfinished or are in the process of being updated. They bear signs of inaccessible construction sites that depict roadblocks. It is a disruptive update process. Services such as Google’s products that are in a perpetual beta state are invisibly being updated. Platform updates do not go unnoticed to users (as can be seen in the case of privacy settings in Facebook and Google Buzz), but it does not immediately disrupt their webflow. Updates are less disruptive because they are being performed in the backend instead of the frontend.

The term beta is also a social construct in the Google world similar to the Under Construction signs indicating “I’m sorry” or according to Jeff Jarvis a way of not having to say sorry:

“Beta” is Google’s way of never having to say they’re sorry. It is also Google’s way of saying, “There are sure to be mistakes here and so please help us and fix them and improve the product. Tell us what you want it to be. Thanks.” (Jarvis 2009: 91)¹

Google’s products often start in Google Labs before they graduate for public use. The next step is usually a few years in beta which in Google terms means that the product is mature enough for public launch but that it may come with flaws. In the summer of 2009 Google decided to remove the beta label from its major products:

Today we’re paving the road. We’re taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk to remove any doubt that Apps is a mature product suite. (Rahen 2009)²

Recent Google experiments are launched in Google Labs or labelled with a Preview label instead of a Beta label, as in the case with Google Wave. Beta, as Google’s way of not having to say sorry, seems to have disappeared. However, the introduction of Google’s new service Google Buzz forced Google to publicly say sorry to its users. The service, similar to Twitter, was introduced overnight without the infamous beta/preview logo. It just appeared as a new feature within/on top of Gmail. Its default privacy settings revealed a list of contacts of “people you email and chat with most.” After complaints from users about the sudden publication of their contactlist Google admitted the ‘Buzz social network testing flaws‘ to BBC News. Products are usually extensively tested with friends/family or a relatively small set of users in a private beta. Buzz was launched without these tests and users immediately pointed to its privacy flaws. While Google considers our life to be a beta where experimentation is key, Google Buzz showed that its users base is not quite ready or interested in living life as a beta.

 

Life is a beta

1. Jarvis, Jeff. What Would Google Do? New York: Harperluxe, 2009).[↩]
2. Sheth, Rajen. “Paving the road to Apps adoption in large enterprises.” Official Google Enterprise Blog 7 Jul 2009. Web. 26 Feb 2010.[↩]

Last month Google announced the launch of their Real Time Search engine. By including real time search results Google has now officially embraced the updatesphere as a subsphere of “The Web,” as may be seen in the following figures.

Fig. 1: Part of the main index

Fig. 2: Updates as a subcategory of index results

Fig. 3: The updatesphere

In my real time web results Google is indexing updates performed within the three popular micro-blogging platforms: Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca. Notably absent are the status updates from the social networking site Facebook because of its partial walled garden structure. However, it may not be long before these updates will be included as well because Google recently made a deal with Facebook¹. However, it is interesting to note that Google will only receive Facebook updates from public updates on pages (such as fan pages) while competing search engine Bing will receive updates from public profile pages (personal profiles) that are marked as visible for everyone.

Already in 2008 Google started expanding its indexing focus to actions within social networks but the indexed actions were quite messy, for example:

• silvertje has started 0 topics. silvertje has made 1 reply. … silvertje replied on May 13, 2009 06:25 to the question “We want all …”
• Anteek added a contact: Anne Helmond. MyBlogLog Action submitted by Anteek -
• Uploads from Anne Helmond, tagged… – http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvertje/tags/amsterdam/
• Qik | Anne Helmond | Untitled. Streamed by Anne Helmond. More at http://qik.com/silvertje.

These actions performed on social objects² such as Flickr photos, blog posts and videos, seemed to be Google’s first steps into real-time search. By partnering up with Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and Twitter, Google has now officially welcomed the updatesphere.

Twitters’ status updates have been included in Google’s index for a while but they are now actively promoted on the main site:

Google Social Search and the statussphere

Please note that this screenshot shows the Social Search experiment, part of Google Labs > Experimental Search. It seems that -while writing- Google removed the real-time social results from the main site and moved it to its Labs.

Status updates are moving from the Web sphere to its own distinct sphere: the updatesphere. Google is acting as a demarcating engine in the construction of the updatesphere.³

1. Google its official partners are: “Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.” Google, Relevance meets the real-time web[↩]
2. social because they the objects are part of social web services that allow other people to participate in the objects by tagging, rating, leaving a comment, embedding or favoring for example[↩]
3. For more on web spheres: R. Rogers, The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. (38p) [pre-print pdf][↩]

I appear as an actor in the official Google Chrome OS UI Concept Video on YouTube. Fame at last!

Thanks to @jvdgoot for noticing.

Konrad Becker Book Presentation: Deep Search. The politics of Search Beyond Google

Conference visitors

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Richard Rogers, University of Amsterdam

Florian Cramer

Society of the Query conference photography for the Institute of Network Cultures by Anne Helmond. More pictures on Flickr.