Perhaps these have been the same people who’ve declared Google+ a failure over and over again. Even the fastest growing social network is not enough in a world that has Facebook. And even if there would be tens of millions of registered users for the service already after a few months, at least they weren’t using this “ghost town” of a network (see the discussion around #aavekaupunki in Finnish). Yeah, it can only be a failed attempt from the Mountain View engineers to build a Facebook clone, since that is the gold standard of social networking that every other contender must be evaluated against.

To all those people surprised about the launch of Google “Search Plus Your World” with integration to Google+ profiles, circles and posts, I’d like to present the following question: did you think for a moment that Google was not going to leverage it’s core competence (search) in the social network it was building? Vice versa, was it not blatantly obvious right from the start that the company would utilize this new social data source it has unlimited access to (G+) for improving the relevancy of search results?

Ok, enough of the “my network is better than your network” wars. For the end user there’s precious little significance in which US based company is luring in the biggest number of status updates per second. What we ultimately want is for the creation, sharing, discovery and consumption of relevant information to be as convenient as possible, so the question is: what can I get out of a social search engine that wasn’t possible before?

Yesterday I came across a brilliant presentation from Jeff Atwood (behind Coding Horror and more notably Stack Overflow), which contained this quote from Clay Shirky:

Work is when your boss tells you to do something, you do it, and you get paid.

work is motivated by inherent interest and generally unpaid.

It was late Sunday evening and I had happily spent a good number of hours reading work related articles on my free time and loving every moment of it. The though of the looming Monday morning and returning back to mundane Work tasks made the concept strike a nerve and I decided I wanted to post it on a social network, as people generally do nowadays in such situations. I went googling for the source of the quote, to get a link that would be shareable (yes, it is a word). This is what I received:

It turns out I had actually already posted an article referencing the very same speech 11 months ago, only I didn’t have any recollection of it. It was on my Posterous “blog” that I’ve used mainly as a public noteboard of interesting articles I come across regarding knowledge work. Due to the ultimate simplicity of Posterous, it’s very quick to compose an email with quotes, images & links, send it to the Posterous email address  and see it turn into a blog post, which is why you don’t need to spend much time thinking about the topic itself. A noteboard is only useful if you know to go and read its content, which is what I didn’t know. But Google did.

Ok, the result in the example is most likely taken from a tweet rather than a Google+ post, since that didn’t exist last February yet. The point is not really about Google+ itself, rather it serves as yet another reminder that the web knows you better than you do. Instead of being frightened of the privacy implications, what I would recommend everyone to do is to make the most of it – exploit the intelligence of the machine that we’ve all helped to build.

Related artists. Who to follow. Recommendations based on your browsing history. The Web has to be working for us, not the other way around.

— Jukka Niiranen (@jukkan) January 5, 2012

For example: in a world of personalized search, is there any longer a need for social bookmarking á la Delicious? Why should I bother saving links into my own list on a separate point solution like Delicious, when I might as well share the link to my followers/circles/friends/whatever and trust that the system will bring it up if I ever need it again? Trying to come up with descriptive tags for links all on my own seems like a futile attempt compared to the power that the networked online society can have on building relevancy for the shared content.

To continue on the thoughts expressed by Shirky, sharing is work, but not Work, as it feels inherently like the right thing to do and requires effort, yet you don’t get paid for it. “Big Work drives the economy, little work drives the Internet.” It took around 100 million hours to create all of the content on Wikipedia, but thanks to the evolutionary nature of social technology and the network effect, the next Wikipedia will most likely take only a fraction of those hours. It has to, and we really shouldn’t settle for anything less. It is therefore imperative that the tools being built by companies operating in the realm of IT, be it the Google Goliaths or the start-up Davids, strive to make the most of what the collective little work of the online population has already built, because that is the best way to foster motivation of workers (with a lowercase w). This motivation, in turn, will be more and more in demand as the human civilization is facing problems that its capitalist system is not very good at solving. The little work can go a long way.

As what comes to the search engine business that built Google / Google built (any which way you want to look at it), we’ve already seen signs that indexed search has peaked. The way we used to search for content is on the decline, and if Google would be sticking to what they do best now, fighting against the next big thing, they would be standing on the deck of a sinking ship. You could well blame them of being hopelessly late to the game of social, but based on what I’ve seen from them during the past year, I wouldn’t count them out just yet. The reason is, I believe we don’t yet have nearly enough tools for social technology to make us as smart as we could be.

Right now we have the infrastructure  in place for networking with people and sharing content. That’s a good start and it’s been a big enough revolution on its own to fuel the stellar rise of services like Facebook and Twitter. However, if we’d just continue on the same path of ever increasing tweet counts, would we end up becoming increasingly smart or rather end up in the lunatic asylum? If we look at the content search functionality offered by Twitter (basic keyword search on less than a week’s worth of data) or Facebook (absolutely none!), it’s easy to see that the game has only just begun on developing content relevance and discovery algorithms that deliver real added value over simply consuming an ever growing feed of data. While social media has brought us new strategies to overcome information overload through relying on recommendations and content sharing  by people we know/trust, this won’t scale indefinitely, and it is in fact quickly contributing to the very problem it once promised to solve.

In order for us to keep getting smarter through social networks, the filters available to us will need to get smarter first. The question is: can Google produce the missing UI needed for harnessing the true power of social networks? And if not Google, then who?

Recently I haven’t been touching iTunes much at all, since my online music consumpion has transformed from files to streaming, thanks to Spotify. Many times there are still tracks that are not available through the Spotify subscription service, which is when I turn to see if iTunes is providing them available for purchase. Much to my surprise, I’ve started to increasingly dislike the iTunes experience. Looking at the results from the new 2010 Customer Experience Index by Forrester, it looks like I’m not the only one.

Let’s compare what happens when I search for an artists in both services. iTunes goes first:

With the current version of iTunes 9, there’s just too much going on in the user interface. Even with the UI chrome excluded from the picture, there’s still way too many items fighting over my attention. Furthermore, I don’t get the immediate Google Experience ™, where the first search result is big and bold, waiting to be clicked. In iTunes the items are too small and don’t appear clickable, maybe because there’s just so much I could click on. Overall, the navigation just feels like too much work, not enough fun.

What about in Spotify then:

Lots of small text here as well, but it’s a lot more bearable, since the structure is so clear. I know the purpose of each UI element and they are grouped in a logical manner, so that none of the information I’m not interested in feels like any kind of distraction. Even without any previous experience of using the application, I think I would be quite at home in navigating in Spotify, since it follows the univesal language of audio library software. What’s funny is that I think much of that language has evolved from the most popular audio library out there: iTunes.

Why is iTunes starting to become more cluttered? Why is it going down the path of Altavista, which used to be the top search engine of its time, before transforming into a messy portal with too much ads and features going on, then consequently losign the game to Google? My theory is that both iTunes and Altavista have (or had, in the case of AV) the same problem, which is the need to be constantly selling to the user. iTunes Store does not make any money until the user clicks “buy”, and it needs to achieve this same behaviour time and time again. In a similar fashion, the portal fever that Altavista was infected with consisted of presenting as many ad banners to the visitor as possible, whereas Google cleared away the clutter and developed a way to show only relevant text ads in predetermined sections.

The Spotify model doesn’t have the hard sell built into it. Its model lures in new users with free accounts, to explore the simple functionaliy built over the vast library of music available for streaming by just clicking on it, building up an engaging first experience of the service. Sure, the users are greeted with audio ads between tracks, unless they purchase the premium account. However, that’s a handicap that you can disable with giving them money, and I’m betting people can easily understand the trade-off there. In iTunes Store there is no subscription service that would make the catalog browsing free from the hard sell. Not until Apple starts offering the similar streaming scheme as Spotify, that is.

Let’s take one final look at another UI for searching a particular artist. With the introduction of Google Music giving some glimpse of things to come, I’m betting that the future UI design patterns for audio libraries will most likely be coming from the masters of search.

Here’s a demonstration of the core difference. Slashdot.org is down (at the time of writing), so do I go to Facebook and yell this out to my friends? Hell no, I haven’t got enough nerdy buddies that would care about it. But what about on Twitter?

Nowadays the best way to determine whether a popular online service is down just for you or the entire web population is to do a search on Twitter. There is always going to be some people wondering the exact same question as you, to the extent that they will go through the effort of tweeting about it. That’s the real-time pulse that Google is still missing.

If only Twitter’s front page would be designed in a search oriented way, driving people towards entering search terms instead of new tweets (who needs more of them, anyway?), the perception of the service could be altered in a quite profound way. Until then, the average user will upon initial viewing just see it as Facebook without Farmville and Mafia Wars. For some people, that will of course be reason enough already.

Nevertheless, some changes in the behaviour and assumptions of the web audience are so profound that you shouldn’t really even dare to assume that you have an option whether to comply with them or not. One such assumption is the ability to search. The sad fact of the matter is that a huge portion of casual surfers don’t even know what is a browser, since all they do is search through Google, even for the URL to a site they want to visit. Hell, if it wasn’t for the smart address bar in Firefox that let’s me access pages from my browser history so painlessly, even I might be lazy enough to just google the name, instead of wondering about .com/.net/.fi.

In the current climate, you are then pretty safe to assume that most users enter your site as a result of a search (hence the popularity of SEO). What happens then after they reach your site? Well, unless they were lucky enough to land on the exact right page, I bet they’d prefer to do a search on the content of the site. The absolute quickes way to information is a search box, or at least it should be, when the search is working like Google is. Even if the results are not quite as well organized, it’s still useful when the visitor is looking for some more rare keyword.

How can it then be that in 2009 there is still an incredibly large portion of midsize retailer sites that are lacking the search functionality altogether? Take this one example: Koti-Idea furniture store.

There are 2 tempting boxes in the top right corner, but that turn’s out to be the account login, so most visitors will not be interested on that. There’s a shopping basket on the bottom left, but I don’t see anything to add to it yet. There’s even an application (IE only) for designing your own bookcases or sofas, which sounds all fine and dandy. However, I can’t get to the product which I have in my mind, since there’s no box to type in the name and click “search”. Instead, I would need to start thinking in categories and navigating menus. How much fun will it be to start guessing the taxonomy adopted for this particular store, browsing through one category after another, just in case you would run into the product you are, well, searching for.

Upon my quest for new furniture I ran into several sites that lacked any means of searching for the products that were hidden somewhere deep in the folder structure. Sure, I could have always gone back to Google and do an advanced search for hits from that particular site. In the non-eCommerce world that would have been roughly the equivalent of walking into a store, then going back home and returning with a credit card, just because the cashier didn’t accept cash payment. Now wouldn’t you just rather walk to the store next door instead?