Yoogle
Nick Carr gets perilously close to jumping his own shark when he asks when does free get predatory. I knew he could go there some months ago when he listed Google as merely a disruptor of "real" platformers such as Microsoft and Apple. Perhaps Nick has a bit of an Innovator's Chasm he's having difficulty crossing in the bust out of the YouTube Economy. It must feel good and quietly unsettling to have Ballmer and Parsons as bunk mates in these turbulent waters.
Adam Curry makes the point on yesterday's recording of the Gillmor Gang that we are not media experts. I left it alone during the show, as Calaconis and Arrington held their own quite nicely, but that doesn't mean I had nothing to say. As Carr will discover, the fundamentals behind the YouTube snowball accommodate not just Google, but the economy of gestures. Digg and MySpace had as much to do with the YouTube buyout (listen to the show when it ships to understand what I mean by that phrase) as any antitrust-triggering power curve.
Google seems headed in precisely the opposite direction as Microsoft. In recent weeks, I've been invited down to not just receive briefings but actually participate in the fine-tuning of features in Google Reader and the Docs/Spreadsheet mashup. Suggestions have been coded into the software in the interim. API promises have been irrevocably tendered, and the two-way dialogue seems impossible to recork. Trust me, this is behavior I've never seen, from Microsoft or Lotus (who I essentially blackmailed into bug fixes in the Notes 4.5 era on the backs of an Information Week Labs review I held over them.)
What Google seems to value is authority, not the store-bought kind but the transparent kind. These early looks were under NDA embargo, so there was no carrot in terms of scoops (not that I give a shit about scoops.) The lunch provided was nothing special (or nothing more special than what every Google employee receives.) But what they don't provide in schwag or exclusive access they do provide in confidence, confidence that they have the goods and the willingness to listen and adapt. Their adaptability in fact is the single most devastating threat to Microsoft and others, and is what may well be triggering the counterattack by Nick and Steve so early. Waving the antitrust flag is a profound gesture of weakness.
That doesn't mean the tool won't be effective as a rallying point for the competition. But who is the competition here? Yahoo? I think not. As YouTube rolls up television, Yahoo becomes more of a partner than a competitor. A more RSS-controlled TV Guide provides additional inventory for Yahoo to hang communities of interest around the survivors in the content compression that is now underway. The Beck concert and original video are Yahoo's future as a studio — as with all the Office 2.0 startups on display last week, Yahoo's best opportunity is to go vertical with its not-so-micro communities by slipstreaming behind the Yoogle APIs.
Same for Fox: I'll gladly eat a widget today that adds functionality to my Google apps and pay for it Tuesday with the credits I've earned by narrowcasting my gestures. The cutoff threats by Parsons and NBC may move the needle on Wall Street, but they bounce emptily off us users, who just don't watch the shows they can't get in the new TV. And watch out if your thick client (I use the term semi-disparagingly instead of rich, but they're interchangeable) doesn't support the Mac. I missed Fox's Justice (a guilty pleasure) due to a power failure and couldn't get it to work on the Netstream. NBC shows require my Tablet, which has been dust-catching for months since I got a MacBook Pro.
Remember: it's not the ability to watch a missed show on the Net that counts, it's the ability to watch enough of it to click away and never come back. In the Yoogle universe, it's negative gestures that carve out the most useful real estate. My entertainment partners are Jobs (iPod for Grey's Anatomy in a pinch) and CBS (made the key deal on the day of the buyout and provided streaming of Big Brother whenever CBS SF preempted it for a stupid football game) and BitTorrent so I can ALWAYS get Studio 60 no matter what happens and Bill Carter and other TV insiders for signalling when good or cusp shows like Kidnapped get cancelled so I can boot them off my DVR backlog to clear space. And of course, Yoogle for its rollup of Comedy Central, cable news, sports, and that's all folks.
On the Gang, most of the media experts agree that Google will own an operating system within two years. Interestingly, Farber and I disagree. Farber for reasons you can listen to, me because why buy the milk when the cow is free? Besides, if Curry and Calaconis and Vizard are right, I'll be able to afford the sushi dinners I've bet, because that will mean that Nick and Steve's Justice Department daydream will have been cancelled in favor of a Department of Gestures.
October 15th, 2006 at 7:25 pm
Maybe I missed the joke. Was Jason one of the people who spelled Gillmor wrong in the past? And now you repay him with “Calaconis.” Very funny.
October 16th, 2006 at 6:30 am
Got to agree with Mike A., the splendor-game was a bit too much for my liking. And Jason has to tune up his act regarding the ads - just “mmh i love insert name kiss kiss kiss” is boring.
I think this one could have been moderated more, since it was essentially Jason, Adam, Mike and Hugh talking. When is Robert Anderson getting to speak up? Time to drop some knowledge on the audience.
October 16th, 2006 at 8:12 am
[…] Gillmor on Yoogle and related input from Nick Carr, Adam Curry. […]
October 16th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
I am one of those that skips the first four minutes of every segment of every episode and I have no idea who the sponsors are. The secret plan is not working on me. All the promoting of Splendor has left a bad taste in my mouth. I doubt that I would give them any business. In fact they should pay me for having to sit through that drivel. I propose to the listeners of this show that they boycott all sponsors until Steve decides to cut the advertising down to a reasonable length and delivers an episode as a single download.
I think Jason lost a lot of respect he had established with his comment that he tells it like it is to a person’s face and then kisses Adam’s ass throughout the call. Adam said nothing to convince me that PodShow knows what they are doing. Dan’s comment that the show is about entertainment and not information is off the mark. You guys are just not that funny. It seems that the gang is trapped in an ever expanding self-indulgent bubble that is on the verge of popping. It’s pathetic that Mike is now going to stop being critical of Google just because they showed him a little respect. It’s amazing to me that he does not understand why his credibility is in the toilet. Also, in my (not humble) opinion Hugh’s contribution is still worthless.
This episode sucked except for the debate about Google OS. It’s not going to happen. However, they might develop a web application server that gets downloaded to the client for local browsing of their apps and which includes a CMS that synchronizes as needed with their cloud. Also, Office 2.0 has little to do with business models or spreadsheets or word processors. It’s about making departments and teams more efficient in their business *processes*. IT still matters.
October 17th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Yoogle Means Yahoo Better Silo Its Content (and other Gillmor buzzphrases)
Every once in a while, I check in with the Gesturelab, to see if there’s something comprehensible there … some solid point about the future of web-based biz that I can take away and grok over. So inject this little
October 22nd, 2006 at 6:34 pm
[…] Something has been bothering me since Adam Curry talked about media vs. technology on the Gillmor Gang. And I’m also left wondering why Jason Calacanis pumps up AdSense and yet gets labeled a “media guy”, or even calls himself such. I think it’s a dis-credit to himself. He’s much more than that. He’s an “Attention” guy. You see, media by it’s very nature can be disintermediated, and I don’t think any strategy that could fall prey to that is a good one. Is Google a media company. No. Media companies aggregate content makers and act as mediaries between the advertisers and the media consumers.(sorry to Doc, i don’t like the word consumer either) Google is doing more than that. They are an Attention clearing house. It’s what Jason might call an enabler, and it’s why the successful new companies we adore all seem to be doing just that. del.icio.us, grazr, edgio, top ten sourcesetc. Enabling an attention transaction to occur. Think eBay or Craigslist. OPML, not HTML. Tom Morris, not Morris, the cat. There is no enabling happening here, just intermediation. Jason’s latest venture is about enablement, so I think he’s on the right track. Paying people doesn’t change that, as long as a service is open. Attention enablers can’t be disintermediated. They can be replaced, but not disintermediated. I don’t come from the software industry. I much more relate to what Dave Winer calls a himself, a “media hacker”. And that’s what he calls Scoble too. It’s not really about technology. That is a means, not an end. Technology itself can be disintermediated or commodified. Soon, we will plug into technology like we do into electrical outlets. It’s happening now. So I say that the winning companies are not media companies or technology companies, but Attention companies. And if PodShow is a media company, it may succeed in the short run. But to last and grow, it will have to transform to an Attention company. So will Tribune, New York Times, Microsoft, Podosphere.com and the whole lot. Oct 22 2006 09:34 pm | RSS and gillmor and jarvis and newspapers and media and buzzmachine and winer and cluetrain and searls and stevegillmor and davewiner and jeffjarvis and OPML and microsoft and oldmediadoomsday and web2.0 and whathehellisallthisabout and Attention and scoble and blogging and del.icio.us and wordpress and grazr and myspace and arrington and mikearrington and gestures and gesturebank and tv and edgeio and sethgoldstein and tommorris and advertising and Halley Suitt and TopTenSources and calacanis and jasoncalacanis and adamcurry | […]