Google has given us 10 free tickets for TechCrunchIT readers to attend for the upcoming Google I/O developer event on May 27-28 in San Francisco.
Google I/O will be held at the Moscone Center and will cover the following topics: the Android, App Engine, Chrome, GWT, and AJAX APIs, with a special focus on the enterprise. Last year’s event saw one of the first demonstrations of Google’s Android mobile phone OS, as well as the public launch of App Engine. Google also handed out T-shirts cleverly meant to spell out “Google IO” in binary, except they actually said Google KO.
Tickets are usually $400 each; but we are giving ten free tickets away to readers who give us the best answer to this question:
Does Google have a real-time strategy and if so, how is it going to compete against Twitter and Facebook in the real-time wars given the recent death of RSS?
Please submit your answer in comments and TCIT editor Steve Gillmor will pick out the ten best answers (be sure to use your real Email address).
real-time
1. google just added uploading videos directly from android to youtube. this should soon be available to other phones via google mobile (can live streaming be far behind?) they can index the audio content of the video and have access to a huge amount of real-time data that way.
2. jaiku engine can be deployed to app engine in 5 minutes. they are currently working on supporting the open microblogging spec and adding xmpp as soon as app engine supports it. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592145) PubSubHub looks interesting and may tie into this as well.
3. twitter is still simultaneously being taken over by spam and focusing on becoming a broadcast platform for famous people. other services are going to become more appealing as twitter begins to jump the shark. it would probably be trivial to add “tell the world/you friends what you are doing” at many points across their service spectrum. no reason they couldn’t be optionally piped out to twitter..
4. if google added a “tell the world what’s on your mind” button to their google search front page, and the results were aggregated at, say “current.google.com”, but integrated into google search results similarly to youtube, would that not be a huge incentive to post updates there?
6. RSS is not dead it is ubiquitous.
those were just off the top of my head, i’d love to go to google i/o
This response shows why your contest give away is a bad idea. Some boneheads yammering on about how they think they understand tech while also kissing the TC ass, boring. I’d rather read a schonfeld post. All you free ride losers should just fork over the cash, or at worst, just sneak in.
Sure they have a strategy. ‘Be a mammoth money-making machine that could easily just purchase the winner of the “real-time wars.”‘
Does Google have a real-time strategy and if so, how is it going to compete against Twitter and Facebook in the real-time wars given the recent
Few pointers to think about:
(1) Google could use it’s massive advertising customer relationships to seek advertising contracts from Twitter/Facebook.
(2) Apart from twitter and facebook, blogsphere is an open world. Google could invest in developing a search engine for the other part of real-time web
(3) Google could deliver an analytics and advertising tool to be put above the Twitter/ Facebook real time data. Real time data would require massive parallel computers for search and it’s use also would be limited to only certain types of searches.
Money doesn’t bring happiness but it can buy everything else
First of all, I wouldn’t be able to go to the event.
Just wanted to point out that real time search results are not always the most relevant ones. For example, searching for a celebrity’s name in hopes of finding a biography is instead going to return a horde of articles of that celebrity’s latest breakup.
My suggestion? Allow for either – integration in this case could be VERY sticky and probably not for the best.
This is the “I will not be able to attend” thread :D.
I’d like to second Rachel’s point. Realtime is only so good today because of the sparse information that is covered. I don’t believe it is in Google’s interest to overwhelm the realtime information productions…
Information and irrelevant stuff should remain separated!!!
Google’s real-time strategy should be based around making real-time content (i.e. tweets, images, posts from Twitter, FB, etc.) searchable. There is a gold-mine (of data) for the system(s) which can understand the context of posted real-time content/data and return highly relevant search results. This should be Google’s strategy. It’s their core competency and a void that needs filling.
Google absolutely has a strategy. They are providing the resources and avenue to develop a world changing real time system. Google App Engine and the Android platform provide a zero cost opportunity for anyone to step up to the plate and provide better integration of thee mobile world with realtime updates.
Twitter is not being used as it was originally intended. It’s full of advertisement’s, spam, conversations. Most user’s wouldn’t be content receiving all this information in a single place as text messages on their cell phone, they shouldn’t be content lumping everything together on twitter. It’s great for it’s original use(What are you doing?) but inefficient for what’s going on now. Facebook has similar issues but on a much smaller scale.
Giving the world the resources to make something better is the best weapon they could possibly have against Twitter or Facebook.
First of all- Real time search is really important.
Think about this question for a second – how many people have homepage or webpage these days…not much except for some PhD students to market themselves.
The real time part of web is increasing at a very fast rate and it’s going through a major push…..
The question is: How can someone create value out of real time search ? No one would disagree that there is some fossil value there.
Abhi
Google’s ability to roll out features pervasive to the platform and their numerous web properties will give it an immediate placement and awareness advantage.
Imagine logging into Google.com or simply browsing to Google.com or an of an array of “powered by” sites that use Google.com search functions and being greeted with the following option:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcuthrell/3483856943/
Then compound this new search timeline option with a single sign on that can maintain a history of all your real time queries, mapping to your FOAF, mapping to a new popular metric, and distilling this down as an option Google Alert or new pre-labled entry in your Gmail inbox for later review.
Given the chance to unleash the realtime potential, Google will move into a new realm of applying their by the minute, by the hour, by the day approach to spiders/indexes/sitemap.xml.gz/pings strategy to encompass stream parsing in real time delivered as needed to those wishing to pulse the past but the near present.
“those wishing to pulse not only the past but the near present.”
Addendum:
Google strategy for realtime will be much like the appearance of their traditional search product for Web appearing in Gmail.
In this example, everyone on the outside assumed or could go so far as to -know- Google could do it. The key was when not if Google would do it.
The path of prior M&A would indicate that Google can learn a lot and/or destroy the device under test to the outside view. Internally, the size and depth of where engineering talent can be reshaped and/or refocused at near (sheer) will speeds is a likely consideration to place in the plausible column.
In essence, realtime is the other endpoint of the curve that places the ever trailing desire to curate, index, and make ready for search of the world’s data. In this rapidly splitting edge case (moving rapidly to core) where each contributor is a new member to an exploding node set collection far in excess of anything resembling the “blog” explosion, we see a challenge that must excite and breath life into Google engineering talent.
So, I expect finding a passionate team within Google to tackle the realtime “problem” (opportunity) is not a long shot.
Risks: the sailors that want to ride up the river are the best and are lost, turn on their fleet, or join another navy (wild speculation on who would gain from control over the realtime)
Rewards: those sailors chart the course for the armada to find comfortable berth and the blueprint for building a new nimble class of vessel to pilot and carry the mercantile desires up those realtime streams
FOR BUSINESS
Google already has the following real-time streams of data that would be interesting to business:
1. Which search results are clicked in a given SERP.
2. Which Adwords ads are clicked.
It’s arguable that businesses don’t care about individual Twitterers but for the aggregate consumer patterns. Google could provide enormous consumer data to business. For example, what business wouldn’t pay for this kind of data in their industry:
* In the last 3 minutes, 115 people searched for “bicycles”
* 50 clicked on trekbikes.com
* 20 clicked on schwinn.com
FOR INDIVIDUALS
Google could allow individuals to publish any/all actions taken on Google properties, such as reading an article on Google Reader, watching a video on YouTube, or performing a search. With the user’s permission, and no extra work from the user, Google could produce a feed like this:
* John read “Study: One in Five U.S. Homes Are Cellphone Only” on TechCrunch.com and starred it.
* John searched for “cell phones” and visited http://www.att.com.
* John watched “Love Story Meets Viva La Vida” on YouTube.
* John wrote 5 emails in Gmail.com.
* John search for “the economy” in Google News and visited an article on CNN.com.
Yes. Google in all likelihood is going to buy Twitter as part of their real-time search strategy. Twitter understands the value/potential of all this, so they won’t settle for anything less than outright acquisition at a lucrative valuation. For Google, it will be part of their universal search paradigm. Google now coupled with Twitter will be a potent player against Facebook. Unless Facebook starts having public profiles, Google+Twitter will emerge to be clear winners.
This is slightly off-topic, but why has TechCrunch recently begun placing obnoxious flashing advertisement boxes in their RSS feed? I don’t mind advertisements if necessary, or even a teaser and cut-off, but I these ads are truly awful, more on a level I would expect for a trashy website, not of the class I thought I could expect from techcrunch.
no they have a realtime social media strategy. they dont need one.
if they wanted to they could have bought a major realtime social engine. they dont want to be too dominate. imagine if they owned fb how many people would be up in arms. right now they are winning the digital media wars because of revenue. they are not interested in social real time – social network anything that dont make any money and raises more antitrust issues. with 70% search market time and monetization is on their side for at least 3-5 years. the strategy is to ride the one trick pony all the way to the bank.
StrategyLocator.com – prepare yourself
Google could just purchase Twitter or Facebook if it saw a great revenue stream.
But the bigger question is why would Goggle want these platforms unless the revenue stream increased theirs.
They have many other aps and platforms they are pursuing.
no
Google news and blog search are already real time
It can bring this feature to the main search pages
Also google lets you search real time using advanced search options.
In a quest for whats hot and happening ! we are becoming victims of spammers and meme sites.
Hope google can clear the cesspool and give me only whats important
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and fortunately for us this does not exclude the real time web. In the past we have seen Google leverage their advertising partnerships to advance this mission and I do not see any reason we cannot apply the same logic to what’s ahead.
With the implementation of Profiles, enhanced News, and Connect options, Google is slowly adding ways for people to contribute to the Real Time Web without most people noticing. All Google has to do is to take these entities and have a tighter fitting offering that brings Gmail/GTalk, Profiles, Reader, News, Search together in one place. Then we will be able to make friends, chat, share our latest offerings, and have content sent directly our way because of the massive leverage Google will have because of their audience. This I would call the Meta Network.
Just some thoughts I had, thanks for the consideration.
Matthew you won one of the free tickets. COntact me at steve@techcrunch.com for the code
It is my humble opinion that when it comes to useful data to mine, comparing Twitter to Google Search is like comparing an ice cube to Hoth. That being said, and requisite dorky reference aside, I think that Google will try to get in on the real-time pie through an acquisition. I think Google will try to pick up FriendFeed or Twitter, and I think they will be after the users, not the data. I think they would like to import the people developing against the Twitter API, for example, into the Google ecosystem, and make it very easy for them to integrate other Google services into applications which previously only leveraged Twitter. I also think they would like to force users of whatever service they acquire to access said service with a Google login (probably in many cases newly created), as they have done recently with the Doubleclick tools. The overarching goal, of course, is to get more and more people using more and more Google products, with the hope of continuing to create novel advertising products.
+1 for the Star Wars reference. My 4 year old would be proud! :)
Google has been real time since the day 1. But their way of doing it is much less visible compared to say Twitter or Facebook that actually manifest it in all the ways possible (that’s their business after all).
Google instead is focused on collecting all the info and storing it under the pillow for further consideration (things people search for, youtube videos they watch, articles they read etc). It is highly real time just for the chosen few (or rather the algorithms) that are exposed to that information afterwards.
GPS-aware googleearth on handsets, of course. They must already have an android port of the app. I do not see any reason why it could not scale to iPhones as well.
They could do worse than adding geo-located ‘tweet bubbles’ and chat into googleearth.
They’ll probably have a world-moving, mindblowing, extremolicious monsterquery which will tell them exactly what to do next at any given point in space-time.
If not:
I’m not sure I’ll still want to attend…
I always thought Google had this idea much earlier than twitter or facebook but couldn’t find a way around the whole “Big Brother” aspect. Users actively posting information in this status-sphere removes much of the controversy over the legality of aggregating their “personal data.” For example, posting full profile information to the public or other friends in this connection would violate the privacy of the user from a different level. I think people are more protective of what they search and what they do when that extra interface step is removed. If anyone uses Google chrome, you could already see your full history saved within the web browser.
I think it’s the momentum and surging popularity with the mainstream media that makes Twitter a great candidate. Google is probably just maintaining their bid and waiting for the users to accumulate until a plateau is reached with their statistics. Even if they don’t buy out the company, they can still leverage the searchable content with the specific account (i.e. login through an API) to more accurately fine-tune search engine results to the specific user.
Real time searches constitute a single or perhaps double digit percentage of searches. So Google obviously cares a lot about RTS.
To bolster it’s RTS and compete against Twitter and Facebook, Google could:
a) buy one of them
b) index and make their content searchable without buying them (maybe pay a licensing fee to do that)
c) buy a smaller, similar service (b.c. pragmatically speaking a service with 1/10 of Twitter’s volume could provide enough content to satisfy 99% of RTS)
d) create it’s own service. gchat currently has status messages which it could index.
e) publish and make searchable real time search queries, which might be similar to tweets (unlikely due to privacy challenge inherit witch searches—see AOL log fiasco)
my guess is that they will index FB and/or Twitter statuses in the interim until they build or acquire a significantly popular status message service.
In terms of raw numbers, Twitter’s growth was approximately equal to Blogger’s recently, and at the moment, they’re both pretty flat. Twitter is getting pretty spammy, and it’s not entirely clear how they intend to deal with that. Since the J has stopped curving, they might suddently decide that offer from Google was pretty good after all, which would be at least one way Google might end up “competing” with them ;-)
Apart from that, through the encouragement of open standards, interop, and “letting a million Jaiku’s bloom” Google are in a position to take ample advantage of whatever Facebook and Twitter end up doing, because they have:
Infrastructure
Geek power
Advertisers
Mindshare
Eyeballs
Money
+++
Yup, that’s right, *money* – the stuff even banks are having to beg for these days. Google’s got a heap of it. It’s worth remembering that neither Twitter nor Facebook has turned a profit yet – the “stream” might be a fantastic timesuck but it’s far from clear that it’s a hugely monetizable timesuck.
Google is probably perfectly happy that so much of the startup world is focused on these cool & hip companies that don’t make any money, while they reap the benefits of their ever increasing search dominance, the largest number of advertisers ever accumulated by any company in the history of the world, and a big fat cash cow called “Office” they are slowly tearing strips off and turning into bacon. Mmmmm, Bacon.
[nb: I didn't exactly fact check any of this, but I'd quite like to go to Google I/O - so much so that I'm willing to fly all the way from New Zealand to get there. Howza about a ticket, pretty please?]
With their in-house experience Google could replicate Twitter from scratch in short order if they wanted to. So I’m confident they can bring something to the space in a short amount of time, or sooner if they are already working on it.
From the real-time perspective, they also have the know-how. Google maps was one of the first widely used AJAX-heavy applicatons, so they definitely have the knowledge in that space.
They have also been one of the most developer friendly providers, with their APIs being used widely on a range of sites.
Where I think they will lag behind is in aggregation. I still think there is spotty integration of Google’s own offerings (gmail, docs, calendar, etc) so I think they may have trouble differentiating themselves from the FriendFeeds of the world. If they can’t do that, then they relegate themselves to being just one of a hundred content providers, and I don’t think all the money in the world could catapult them in front of Facebook and Twitter.
Does Google have a real-time strategy and if so, how is it going to compete against Twitter and Facebook in the real-time wars given the recent death of RSS?
Answer: No
I’m looking forward to my ticket :)
Does Google have a real-time strategy and if so, how is it going to compete against Twitter and Facebook in the real-time wars given the recent death of RSS?
Google has many properties that can be utilized to compete with Facebook and Twitter, and they have the gmail user base to help them catch up in number of users (if they even need to catch up). Google Profile comes to mind as a valuable new property, luring users with the opportunity to get 1st page search results for there name. If Google could integrate all their services into a nice convenient social interface, that might provide good competition for Facebook.
As far as real-time I can’t think of anything off hand that Google to do to get an edge in real-time. Many of there services are great but they are scattered. Twitter and Friendfeed are more or less focused on one application that lends itself nicely to real-time.
Also, I disagree that RSS is dead. If it is dead then it was never alive. I don’t see RSS is the end user technology for the common user and it never was. RSS will remain as a key “under the hood” technology powering the internet for a long time to come.
It’s often said that RSS is only used by 1% (or some incredibly small percent) of internet users (this is talking about users, not websites that offer RSS). I see that as being an opportunity that Twitter (and Friendfeed) has managed to capitalize on. The opportunity is in providing users the benefit of RSS, without the users knowing that they are even using RSS.
An example how this is being achieved on Twitter is the Twitterfeed.com service. News publishers can setup there Twitter account with there publications RSS feed, Twitter users follow the Twitter account and get the latest posts from that publication. In this case RSS has been hidden but it’s still in use.
This is why I disagree that RSS is dead.
Google should invest in Twitter and come up with some sort of revenue sharing deal. This will allow Google to have a real-time news feed that can show up alongside or embedded in search results and it will allow Twitter to have some income.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/live_folders_bring_the_real-time_web_to_android.php
No, Google does not have a “real time search” strategy, because:
1. “real time” is code for “Twitter”
2. Tweets aren’t indexed by Google
and if that wasn’t enough:
3. Google Blog search showed how googling was the wrong way to interact with RSS, thus implying the same for tweets.
Google’s strength is in consuming, indexing, and providing search for, other peoples data. It will fail if it attempts to become a FB, Twitter, etc.
Google’s strategy should be to keep Twitter from gaining critical mass, and acheiving prominance in search. IMO, Google is in position to do this. It must promote “openness”, as with open social, and help other up-starts compete for market share. This will minimize the power of Twitter, and its search prospects. The key to Google maintaining a dominant position in search (including real time) is to be sure no one party owns all (most) of the data in any prominent category.
Google doesn’t have any real-time strategy particularly against twitter and facebook. As your Rest in Peace, RSS says the race for realtime is already won. But we have yet to see if twitter can provide search results answering the question of “what exactly is everybody doing?” other than providing hot trending topics. I think that’s where Google can leverage its search strategy (technology) and carve out useful information from all the noise. So Google will eventually acquire twitter and provide most relevant and useful search results via its integrated apps in android and chrome.
RALLY THE ECOSYSTEM
OpenSocial Activities Stream – OpenSocial API allows retrieval of activity stream. Currently, an OpenSocial app retrieves activities from one single source, but OpenSocial Specification can be expanded to include multiple sources. With such standardization efforts, streams from multiple sources can be aggregated and mashed-up in new ways; thus marking proprietary stream format such as Facebook’s format a walled garden. After all, there are over 30 containers implementing OpenSocial Standard, including MySpace, Hi5, and Yahoo.
SYNERGY OF MULTIPLE ASSETS
Google owns a number of valuable social assets, such as YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, Gmail, Google Talk, and Profile. Your activities (such as commenting on a photo, or a blog post) can be shown on your friends’ feeds in real-time. Your friends’ activities streams (as well as alerts, notifications, and IM messages) can show in Gmail, Google Talk, or Orkut. With so many different assets, Google can aggregate these user behavior and context information to provide the most relevant activities stream from their friends. For example, with Latitude, Google can present most relevant activity feed of your friends based on location-context.
I don’t see any point in Google trying to compete directly against Twitter or Facebook as far as the core Twitter-like service is concerned. Twitter already has approximately 51761717365153573 users twitting away on its service, and Google would have a real hard time drawing them away and/or attracting new users to the exact same service. If Google wanted to, they could have a few developers bust out a Twitter clone in like two weeks, but there’s not really a point to. What Google does best is find stuff. The data is already there, publicly available on Twitter and Facebook and everywhere else; it’s just hard to make sense of it collectively. Twitter and Facebook have the data and users to generate that data, and Google has the know-how to make it useful. The only thing that really makes sense is some kind of data access/indexing deal or an acquisition.
1) The least viable option : To attack Twitter head on, Google could add, “Whats on your mind ?” text box on Igoogle. (then do option 3)
2) Twitter is extremely popular already. So, Strategy could be “Innovation through acquisition” ie Google acquires Twitter
3)The whole idea of acquisition is to monetize the hype around Twitter. But, If acquistion isnt viable, understand what twitter’s philosophy is. Twitter is about people expressing themselves and google is about search.
Google should notice that its current search page has “Web, Images, Maps, News etc”. ie Information. What it lacks is “People”. Google could add a new section to their search named “People”
Google could search in Twitter, or blogs or various other places which publicly relate to People and their activities.
And If a user is logged in and does a search, the results could be ranked based on User’s public social graph using Google social graph api (XFN, FOAF standards) and combined with any openID/Google connect supported social network.
It could even make the output fancy by showing the results combined with google maps + latitude too and yes of course there are always sponsored results..
“And If a user is logged in and does a search, the results could be ranked based on User’s public social graph using Google social graph api (XFN, FOAF standards) and combined with any openID/Google connect supported social network.”
That is a good idea.
It appears I’m late to the party on this one.
still plenty of time to answer the question
yes.
http://www.jaiku.com/
checkout the copyright at the very bottom.
easy does it.
Heh…
You didn’t finish the question, though.
“Does Google have a real-time strategy and if so, how is it going to compete against Twitter and Facebook in the real-time wars given the recent death of RSS?”
No Google doesn’t have a matching strategy similar to Twitter and Facebook. I didn’t use “real-time” because it is not the best presentation of the strategy that Twitter has evolved and transformed.
Google doesn’t seems to have a PM and a dedicated product team that does nothing but to work in the direction of Twitter. Unless Google
1) approves and sign-off budget,
2) recruit talent,
3) find a champion leader in both PM and Engineer,
4) build strong team,
5) give priority,
6) make it part of Google grand’s vision and plan, 7) succeed in proving revenue model for long term and ROI,
8) receive support from internal product groups
9) offer resources from developer platform,
Google is not able to compete with Twitter. To achieve Twitter level of branding, product, usage, platform success requires a lot more resources due to Google’s size, operation and infrastructure.
It would be wise for Google to partner rather than building its own. It is cheaper. In addition, if Twitter doesn’t come up with a solid business model for revenue in long run, Twitter will become another YouTube that burn cash. Twitter has to prove it can live longer than hype.
I believe Google has a real-time strategy and we will see some of it being talked about tomorrow at the Searchology. The Twitter VCs (Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson) seem to be in town Wednesday – so something is brewing in terms of a partnership between Twitter and Google. It could be an investment or a search deal or an advertising deal.
Additionally Google is probably keeping tabs on FriendFeed. FriendFeed Search is far superior to Twitter. It aggregates Twitter, Flickr and tons of other services. Given that FriendFeed has almost instant updation of tweets twittered by Twitter users, Google can acquire FriendFeed to be cornerstone of its Real time search (if it hasn’t already worked on something that it will show tomorrow). Facebook TOS does not allow realtime search outside of its walled garden so Google is not bothered about it. Google’s strategy will probably revolve around a partnership with Twitter with an acquisition of FriendFeed downstream.
Google does not like that one site owns the realtime web. It wants instead to push many twitter-like sites, and then use its powerful real-time indexing technology (blogs and news are indexed every few minutes) to index them all and serve them up. So its strategy is to push web standards for the real-time web. It served it well in the past.
Hi, I’d love to Google I/O :) It is an interesting question, here is what I think:
One could first think that Google will be the first to filter tweets and deliver noise-free results sets. After all, Twitter is a publisher and Google’s spiders suck the whole web. Twitter, being well aware of its incredible value, of course does not allow search bots (see: http://twitter.com/robots.txt )
I do think Google has a real-time strategy, yet no specific plans. We all know that copycats are poorly performing in the Internet industry; there is no way Google will build its own twitter. As a matter of fact, Jaiku started as an early twitter competitor became an open-source project for micro-publishing services.
I don’t believe Google will acquire twitter. At least not in the next 6 months. The complementarities are obvious: you definitely need real time if you are serious about organizing the world’s information; and a social dashboard “gmail+twitter” is a viable and much less evil alternative to facebook. But Drummond during a recent press event hinted about increased antitrust scrutinity. Another reason is an independent twitter would probably be a better competitor to facebook. Divide and conquer anyone? That’s why “just” an advertising deal is less risky. Unless another big shot acquires twitter but that’s another story :) (A la Oracle buying Sun before IBM)
Google will most likely experiments real time on each of its product. Marissa Mayer talked about adding microblogging to search. Another cool thing Google can do: real-time microblogging with priority based on Latitude’s position. I would love updates only from people actually in the stadium while searching for “superbowl”, people actually in Paris’ streets while searching for “France demonstration” etc. :)
Forget real-time stuff, I want Chrome extensions..
Google with create a meshup(noun yet to be discovered) of its profile, latitude, gtalk, youtube, maps, news etc.
Location based tweeting of messages, video, images, news etc is what Google will be going forward to. All of these features will be closely integrated to their kick-ass search algorithm (I hope somebody must have tried how soon the profiles are getting indexed on Google).
Although Google will never try another facebook or tweeter but it will certainly launch a product which will certainly leverage its existing products and compete with FB and Twitter.
1) Goog’s obvious strat is to buy FB/Twitter to own realtime.
2) Barring that, they can dominate in the proprietary value creation of those third-party apps. In that context, Android is the key. Mobile is where real-time will be published and consumed.
Goog simply makes Android “the phone OS for the rest of us” and creates a centralized device with fantastic apps. Easy to say and hard to do on the consumer side. But Google can cut much more attractive deals w/ carriers than Apple will, and eventually having an iPhone will be like having a Prius. Cool, sure but so what. And Apple’s R&D, marketing and pricing will come under withering fire from way too many fronts: carriers, handset mfrs, even Google.
Given the choice between an awesome product from Apple (who’s earlier to the market) and a somewhat less awesome but also less expensive (and more open) product from someone else, people will go with someone else. Money talks. Just look at the PC market share figures for the last 30 years. Same story. Smartphone market evolution will be like PC market evolution in fast motion. And Android will gain Google an IE-size market share of real-time.
[As an aside re RSS: Twitter may have conquered RSS, but to me that says that twitter is more like RSS in the way the masses will ultimately use it.
Within 2 years, twitter will largely be a data conduit with ad-hoc protocols emerging from third parties in service of applications from third parties. 80% of twitter bits will be data servicing those apps rather than traditional tweets. ]
Like Matthieu A thinking. Searching for the Super bowel and get results from people near by. I buy that.
Twitter in its current form has the ironic condition that the more involved you get in twitter (the more followers you have, the more you write), the more cluttered and useless your “real-time” feed becomes. It becomes a “real-time” nuisance. And unless this problem is solved, the long term retention of Twitter users (which is currently horrible), will not be solved. Google will help here, not simply by “searching” in real-time, but by creating a “personalized” real-time experience possibly by offering a real-time search engine (more below).
Personalization, a concept that has already been in the Google conversation through their ambitious personalized search area, is absolutely essential in making real-time data digestable. The wealth of user data Google holds in their databases, and their advertisement personalization knowledge, will be invaluable in organizing and monetizing the knowledge from real-time sources.
One strategy discussed by many is simply purshasing Twitter. Alternately, they could unveil their own twitter and integrate it into their own products like Gmail (what is your gtalk status after all than a Twitter status?). A major step for google would be to build a real-time search engine that not only sucks in all relationships and real-time changes on Twitter, but also on every blog and other information stream known (maybe by buying FriendFeed).
Though the web has grown on the back of the asynchronous flow of information, the “instant” real-time web is rising. As we spend more and more time on the net and have the net available everywhere through our handhelds, real-time will become more relevant in the future. Google, a company who’s dream is to organize the world’s information, will not ignore this medium and hopefully will use it to become even more useful.
We all noticed the amazing source of information in Twitter when something serious happens.
So I believe Google real-time strategy could be to create a true journalism platform that replaces newspapers:
- Any person with a Google profile could be “followed”, with a simple “Follow” button on people’s Google profile
- Any people you are following would appear in Google News
- That would “friendfeedize” Google News: Enable real-time journalism with a twitter-like service
- That could join the gap between journalists, bloggers and users for real-time conversation: Comments on blogs today are like conversations in a small room. The blogger is the one setting the ambiance, jazzy or whatever. Twitter and Google News are public conversations, in earth space.
- It’s all about replacing newspapers with a journalism platform, and remunerate journalists on their audience
- Use their mobile knowledge – Google apps are available for any mobile phone platform” to enable real-time conversation from any mobile phone
Does Google have a real-time strategy and if so, how is it going to compete against Twitter and Facebook in the real-time wars given the recent death of RSS?
+Does Google has a real-time strategy?
If you consider Gmail and Google talk technologies as a real time strategy, well then yes. Google has a real time strategy. if not, i thought that connecting users through their own searches will be a nice idea. Allowing users to see the profiles of other users who are searching for the same item. also add an option to turn this feature off. The idea is to connect people through their search and increase the users involvement with current google technology like google profile,etc.
+how is it going to compete against Twitter and Facebook in the real-time wars given the recent death of RSS?
I thought it will still take a while for RSS to be completely obsolete. Twitter/facebook provides an opportunity to socialise and update their “tribe” with short text message update. But these short update is limited to the content size. while RSS has an advantage here since the content is fetched directly and aggregated into one location. Hence, Google reader is still relevant. More interesting, notification services like notify.me and notifixio.us are changing the way people receive information.
Hence, if there is a common platform for users to check who else within/or outside their social circle is also using the same platform( Google service) , then there is a chance of socialising through this common platform. While there is a common worry about privacy, therefore there should be an option to turn the feature off.
Another suggestion is to collaborate instead of competing. This can be achieve by building a bridge between all social network and Google.
Last but not least, I WANT to go for Google I/O developer event.
Thank yoU!
Hi, sorry for the delayed comment, first let us look at Google Vs Twitter later Google Vs Facebook
1. Google will buy Twitter through its venture fund.
2. Or if not pay someone else to build it for them. That would be a lot more cost-effective in the long run than paying heavy premium for Twitter.
3.Buying other twitter competitor applications at good reasonable price, which it already owns a significant share would end up costing it less. and promotes it through google services to eat Twitters share.
4.Coming face book, Google already started Open Social platfrom and gathering the crowd to hit the gaint.
Does Google have a real-time strategy and if so, how is it going to compete against Twitter and Facebook in the real-time wars given the recent death of RSS?
There is no real-time strategy, there is plan and that plan is that while Twitter and Facebook keeps growing and developing ways to attract more and more customers, Google’s take should be that instead of re-inventing the wheel with a newer service which might take a while for customers to learn and understand they could just build a platform around those already established successful services.
I think they will be creating a new platform where services like Twitter and Facebook Connect can co-exist within the Google brand. That will be key, that will allow them to bring users from Twitter, Facebook, and any other apps to interact from within a Google branded product.