Two Tales From the Edges of Algorithms
Two short tales landed in my view this past week that provide lessons on the difficulties of getting computers to take over complex problems in their entirety.
Fast Times
Things are moving fast these days.
Only a few weeks ago (er, make that months), I wrote that major search engines were finding themselves ill-equipped to keep up with rapidly-emerging trends, while Twitter and other social networks were becoming good at this realtime reporting. I also thought that Twitter’s major business direction had been set straight for search given the focus on search throughout its website experience, and that they were bound to collide somehow.
After a long hot summer and into autumn I read that new deals with Twitter allow Bing and Google to include tweets in search results. Bing scores a second time through Microsoft’s stake in Facebook by also drawing in status updates from that community. These deals help solve for the search engines’ the problem of knowing what parts of the web are changing so that they can index significant changes almost immediately after they happen.
But this post isn’t really about what I got it right. Rather it’s about what parts I didn’t see coming, and what can be gleaned from that, which turns out to be more interesting.
Speculation Corner: Twitter’s Homepage is the Business Plan
Have you ever wondered if the web is the first medium where businesses could make something deeply valued by customers but struggle with how to actually make money from their innovation?
Radio and television must have faced the same problem, and born lacking a way to meter and charge individual use, broadcasters turned to predominantly ad-based subsidies for free content traded with consumers for their attention. If content producers for radio and TV had been able to control distribution like newspapers did (by nature of selling a physical medium) from the start, I suspect we’d live in a very different media universe. For starters, maybe we wouldn’t have to wonder about ironically-combined cable channel bundles.
Like TV and Radio, the web delivers content people value, and has tried to ape the ad-supported model with dubious results, the most dubious being the rapid consolidation into a monoculture ad economy where one player outweighs them all. The ad-supported model doesn’t seem to scale enough to float really successful web content or services. While the web can deliver on the alternative, metering and collecting payment for content and services, the culture has been saturated by TV and radio to expect the content for free. Now that’s a conundrum.
But you know what, none of that matters, because OMG Twitter changed its homepage. The change is more than aesthetics, and I think it shows how they intend to escape the conundrum of high value and the revenue vacuum.
