Search, Social And Serendipity: Internet Anarchy Goes Mainstream
Obvious statement number 1: Facebook and Google are at war. They’ve taken the fight global, enlisting the help of hundreds of millions of users to determine who will own the Internet.
For Google, it’s all about search – indexing the world’s information so that you and I can find the tiniest needle in a 13.7 billion-straw haystack (the estimated number of indexed webpages as of February 2011, according to WolframAlpha).
Since Facebook’s launch, it has subtly morphed from “a tool that helps people understand what’s going on with the people around them”(Mark Zuckerberg, 2006) to the cornerstone of the social web, where people can discovering information “not just through links to web pages [a la Google] but also from the people and things they care about.” (Zuckerberg, 2010)
This is a battle between the search algorithm and the social graph over how we sort information and, with the world now being documented in real-time, the question of how we overcome ‘data overload’ and sift through everything to extract the nuggets we actually care about is fundamental.
The mind of the collective
The outcome of all this is that it’s becoming easier and easier to find exactly what you’re looking for. Not only do algorithms learn your preferences to return the best results, but every search and piece of identity you part with contributes towards the mind of the collective, so that election results can be accurately predicted before voting has happened and work out your chances of catching flu before you’ve even sneezed. Day by day, we are perfecting our ability to see the future. So Eric Schmit chillingly put it, “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next” (Wall Street Journal, 2010)
The third ‘S’
But where’s the fun in that? As everything becomes more and more ordered, whether through search or social, a new world view is emerging – a third ‘S’ – which is gaining massive momentum: Serendipity.
Internet anarchy is nothing new, in fact it’s as old as the web juggernauts that are so keen to impose (and monetize) order. 4Chan, launched in 2003, is the closest thing to net Darwinism. Completely random ideas swill around its forum pages until one grows, bulges and finally spills over, flattening entire urbanizations made up of respectable internet organizations. The 4Chan army, Anonymous, wreaked havoc on YouTube by uploading vast amounts of porn disguised as children’s videos; they knocking Visa and MasterCard offline; and, most recently, they took down the entire PlayStation network. Digital thrill seeking has gone to new heights as people try to assert their individuality and break out of these automatically imposed organisational structures, but it has always been the naughty outsider. Of course, the only reason these companies have got so big is because of the enormous returns they can make, which poses a bigger question: how do you make money out of randomness?
Hunger for Serendipity
Now it looks like Serendipity has finally come in from the cold; it’s found a way to go mainstream. Nowhere is the hunger for serendipity more obvious than in the explosive growth of Groupon which, after only 18 months of existence, became the fastest growing company in the world and is now valued at $25 billion. Its newly announced ‘GrouponNow’, a mobile app that matches deals to your exact location, doesn’t try to answer questions like “where’s the nearest sushi restaurant?” (Search) or “who kno
ws where I can get sushi?” (Social) but, instead, revels in randomness. How else would I have found myself with a booking next weekend for champagne and sandwiches in a 5 star hotel, or have gone for a fish pedicure? And, of course, Groupon is taking 50% of every penny I spend.
At the same time, Wired magazine described Badoo as ‘the biggest social network you’ve never heard of’, with an equally meteoric upwards trajectory. Rather than trying to connect you to people you know, it does the ex
act reverse. Like Luke Rhinehart in the cult classic ‘The Dice Man’, you put your faith in the dice (a little button at the top of the screen) and see what opportunities pop up. You can then pay money to improve your chances.
This cake is split three ways: Search, Social and Serendipity. Although Google has desperately tried to make it’s slice a bit bigger, its failure to buy Groupon for $6 billion back in December 2010 is exactly the same as its failure to ‘do’ social – its vision of the world is just too blinkered. Google wants to index the world’s information; Facebook wants to make it more social; the rising agents of Serendipity want to throw all that in their faces, and they’ve now found a way to make fistfuls of cash in the process.
