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06.30.09 Is Real Time Knowledge Hurting Us In The Long-term?  By
Robert Scoble
Whew, OK, now that I'm off of FriendFeed and Twitter I can start talking about what I learned while I was addicted to those systems. One thing is that knowledge is suffering over there. See, here, it is easy to find old blogs. Just go to Google and search. What would you like me to find? Chinese Earthquake? Google has it. Now, quick, find the first 20 tweets or FriendFeed items about the Chinese Earthquake. It's impossible. I'm an advanced searcher and I can't find them, even using the cool Twitter Search engine. On April 19th, 2009 I asked about Mountain Bikes once on Twitter. Hundreds of people answered on both Twitter and FriendFeed. On Twitter? Try to bundle up all the answers and post them here in my comments. You can't. They are effectively gone forever. All that knowledge is inaccessible. Yes, the FriendFeed thread remains, but it only contains answers that were done on FriendFeed and in that thread. There were others, but those other answers are now gone and can't be found. The other night Jeremiah Owyang told me that thought leaders should avoid spending a lot of time in Twitter or FriendFeed because that time will be mostly wasted. If you want to reach normal people, he argued, they know how to use Google. And if you want to get into Google the best device - by far - is a blog. Yes, FriendFeed is pretty darn good too (it better be, it was started by a handful of superstars who left Google to start that company) but it isn't as good as a blog and, Jeremiah argues, my thoughts were lost in the crowd most of the time anyway.
And that's on FriendFeed which has a decent search engine (although it remains pretty darn incomplete. Here, try to find all items with the word Obama written in Washington DC on November 4th 2008. Oh, you can't do that on FriendFeed and on Twitter search you can't pull out the important ones and the location information is horribly inaccurate because it isn't based on where a Tweet was done from, but from the tweeter's home location). Here's an easy search: find the original Tweet of the guy who took the picture of the plane that fell into the Hudson. I can do it on FriendFeed after a few tries, but on Twitter Search? Give me a break. Over on Google? One click, but you gotta click through a blog or a journalistic report to get there. Real time search is horrid at saving our knowledge and making it accessible. This is a HUGE opportunity for Facebook, which has more than 10x more users than Twitter and 100x more than FriendFeed. Or, it's how Google will get back into the social networking business and lock everyone out. What do you say Larry Page? Comments About the Author: Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net's Vice President of Media Development. Go to Scobleizer. |
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