BigShinyThing

So. Google (arguably) has access to the most complete and up-to-date dataset of fact, opinion, intent and interconnection on the planet. What’s it doing with it, apart from shifting ads and servicing up web search?

Let’s start with a provocation. Why didn’t Google management either:

1. Profit from,
2. Alert us to, or
Intervene to stop

…the ongoing collapse of contemporary capitalism? Was that an active decision on their part, or do they simply not have the predictive capability? That’s an either-or question. We’re guessing the answer is that they don’t, but that they’re working on it. Wouldn’t you be?

Google’s long-standing interest in zeitgeist and trending suggests a deep interest in the descriptive uses of their wealth of data. Once you have description nailed, then prediction is a logical next target — and prediction at the scale Google might attempt would lead to a historical discontinuity of the kind only tackled head-on by Golden Age science-fiction hacks. Check out, for example, Isaac Asimov’s 1955 short story Franchise set in a [fictional] Election Year 2008 in which

… the United States has converted to an “electronic democracy” where the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac [...] then uses the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held.

The story centers around Norman Muller, the man chosen as “Voter of the Year” in 2008. At first he is not sure he wants the responsibility of representing the entire electorate, worrying that the result will be unfavorable and he will be blamed. However, after voting he is very proud that the citizens of the United States had, through him, “exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise” — a statement that is somewhat ironic as the citizens didn’t actually get to vote.

Indeed.

There has been much speculation that Google is working to develop some general high level artificial intelligence. AI is tricky and doesn’t, we think, fit Google’s proven modus operandi. Google people like to solve pragmatic tasks in clever ways, not mess with fiddly intractables.

Consider Google’s recently announced flu prediction system — which analyses clustering in search query data to infer epidemiology two weeks earlier than traditional methods. We’re guessing the development of this tool offers clues to what Google is really expending the bulk of its computing resource and intellectual activity towards — not on AI research, but on data-driven predictive models for all sorts of real-world happenings — not only those related to public health, but the financial markets, weather systems, sports results.

We’re betting Google doesn’t know which real-world phenomena it will be able to model predictively. It doesn’t matter. As long as it can model some of the systems which drive our lives, Google is placed to dominate the global economy through the next economic cycle. Revisiting our original question — does Google’s non-intervention in the Crash of ’09 mean that they haven’t got the modelling down yet, or that they simply don’t want to Get Involved? Either way, it’s a Google future, people. Enjoy your franchise.

We’ve said before that last.fm and similar (but not as good) music recommendation sites are the future of music retail. Well it appears that CBS agrees with us – they’ve just forked out £140m for last.fm.

For those who have just joined us, last.fm was founded in the UK five years ago and it now has more than 15 million active users. It allows users to connect with other listeners with similar music tastes, to custom-build their own radio stations and to watch music video-clips. What we love about the site is that it invites music fans to stumble upon new music and new genres (New Weird America anyone?).

Unlike a lot of media groups who seem to be frantically trying to build their social networking sites (a glance at the marketing press shows that it’s the buzzword du jour), CBS has recognised that the best aproach is to buy one ready-made.

The firm’s president and CEO Leslie Moonves told the BBC: “Last.fm is one of the fastest growing online communities out there.” He said Last.fm’s strength in building communities around music and syndicating content was “central to CBS”. He added: “Their demographics also play perfectly to CBS’s goal to attract younger viewers and listeners across our businesses.”

As part of the deal, Last.fm’s managing team will remain in place and the site will maintain its own separate identity. Here’s hoping …

Google has announced a souped-up version of online application suite Google Apps. The (un)creatively named ‘Premier’ edition offers enhanced functionality, more online storage, phone support and a bunch of other corporate-friendly features. All with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, for a flat USD50/person/year. Not just a tempting offer for small businesses who want to avoid spend on IT infrastructure — Google has already signed up Procter and Gamble and General Electric as flagship clients.

Sounds like value to us — importantly Google have also published programming interfaces for their office suite, so that third-party developers (or switched-on corporate IT departments who see which way the wind is turning and want to continue to justify their salaries) can enhance and tweak functionality. All that virtual team collaboration stuff? Already in place. Blackberry integration? Soon, probably. Yawn, then take a deep breath: next comes the modern bit.

Google Apps is the first mainstream system to give business users tools which really begin to acknowledge the cloud, tools which aspire to the benefits of those long-used by Linux hackers and wikipedians; tools with which to engage and work with strangers or competitors for mutual advantage. They aren’t there yet — Google’s initial focus is to get some traction in the mundane worlds of word-processing and data-crunching — but the trajectory is easy to plot: on- and up-wards into business-focussed social media. The challenge is to reshape — or re-create — traditional business processes into a form where they can really profit from such tools.

Companies find it difficult enough to move from Flash-heavy websites crammed with stale corporate nonsense, to actual conversation with their audience. It will be much harder for most to find a path on which they can make their borders more porous, their processes more diffuse, their knowledge more open, and yet still have an edge. But adoption of tools like Google Apps — even in their current early form — might serve to redirect people’s attention up from their desks, out through their screens, and into the cloud where the world is. It’s a start. Wait and see.

So, the theory is that dark energy, through some anti-gravitic effect, is the reason, maybe, that our Universe keeps expanding, rather than collapsing into itself. Maybe.

Anyway: hold that thought. Business zeitgeist in London over the last few months has been all about ‘getting to grips’ with social media as knowledge-management tool. Bright shiny lights going off over management heads across the city — if Wikipedia works so well in the real world, why not do it here: get all that tacit knowledge bedded in using tried-and-tested collaborative co-creation tools. I’m all for it. But I doubt that most management teams are anticipate the impact that skilling up with social media, if it really catches on in their business, might have on that business. Turn people onto these tools or, more particularly, onto the value and reward of participatory co-creation, by all means. But don’t affect surprise when you realise that their attention has turned outward, across your firewalls, into the 99.9999999% of the world where most of the things they care about — and 99.9999999% of the expertise that could assist them in their work — already lies. Social media isn’t about collapsing your business’s knowledge resources into a tight knot of hot intellectual property: it’s about joining the vast swirling galaxies of shared effort, collaborative problem-solving, open innovation.

The hackers have known this for years — but it’s only the Web 2.0-era intersection of hacker culture and second-wave digital entrepreneurship that’s exposed the rest of us to the dark energy-like expansionary effect of Wikis, open content, co-creation. First time around, management could read ClueTrain and pay lip service to its manifestos. This time around, business is opening the door to the tools, without still understanding their effect, if they’re actually embraced. There’s a reason they’re called disruptive technologies, people …

All copy from Cluster.