Ever have something you can’t get out of your head? How about two things?
The first thing stuck in my head is the idea that Google is moving wholesale into the content business. They aren’t creating their own content, but they aggregate external content into a “walled garden” and encourage users to host content on Google properties, both actions ensuring that value remains solely exploitable by Google. For product and service folks this won’t matter much, but for people reliant on web content for their income the contraction of the web into mega-portals is definitely a business threat to be aware of. I personally worry that this business tactic may affect the vitality of the web in the long run. Case-in-point, with the recent launch of the real estate layer in Google Maps, realtors are incented to funnel their listings through Google Base rather than posting them openly on the web as GeoRSS or KML. This echoes the aggregation that is occurring in Google’s “Place Pages“, and is a worrisome trend.
The other thing stuck in my head is that stupid Sesame Street pinball counting song… actually I kinda dig it, which is probably why it’s staying stuck.
What I really want to do is to stop thinking about these things. I figured that maybe if I combine the two it will help me exorcise both demons, so:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 !!!!
-J
#1 by Mano Marks on October 22, 2009 - 4:17 am
To be fair, your Base example isn’t exactly a walled garden. Anything uploaded to Base can be accessed as a GeoRSS feed, and there’s nothing to prevent the sites from hosting their own feed as well.
#2 by Jason Birch on October 22, 2009 - 7:29 am
I did make a distinction between the walled gardens (the actual SERPs within Google Maps: Place Pages and Real Estate results) and hosting the content on Google properties. It’s a fairly fine distinction though.
Just because there’s an API doesn’t mean that the data is truly on the web or, in other words, just because a garden has a gate doesn’t mean the walls are less effective. Google could put up a toll-booth or an immigration check-point at any time. For instance, in the early days of Yahoo Pipes, Google Base access disappeared suddenly. This was likely due to load issues, but nothing would prevent similar actions from being taken for competitive reasons.
As far as not preventing sites from hosting their own feeds, Google needs to do better than that. By providing a strong incentive to use a closed infrastructure, Google carries a large enough carrot to strongly affect the behaviour of effort-optimizing small businesses. If a realtor (or a real estate service firm like Canada Placemarks) has limited resources and only sees benefit (SERP position) from publishing to a closed system then they’ll publish to the closed system, whether it’s a semi-open system like Base or a less-open system like My Maps.
I think it makes business sense for Google to use My Maps and Base (and YouTube, and Picassa, and…) to host data that can be served in SERPs. Heck, until recently I was advocating that Google use this approach. It’s easier to manage, and it gives Google a competitive advantage in delivering relevant results. I’m just concerned that this strategy is warping the web.