Google Is for Pandas, Facebook Is for Lobsters

Amplify’d from googlewatch.eweek.com

Google Is for Pandas, Facebook Is for Lobsters

Adam Rifkin, co-founder of social app site Renkoo, said Google, with its search and other task specific, goal-oriented applications, fosters grazing of information. Rifkin wrote:

Adam Rifkin, co-founder of social app site Renkoo, said Google, with its search and other task specific, goal-oriented applications, fosters grazing of information. Rifkin wrote: The kind of application that Google knows how to make well are the kind that embody a panda's "eats, shoots and leaves" model of Internet behavior. Pandas spend every waking hour foraging -- aka searching -- and consuming. The most successful Google applications serve such a utilitarian mandate, too: they encourage users to search for something, consume and move onto the next thing. Get in, do your business, get out. Do a Google search, slurp down information, move on. Pull up Google maps or Gmail or Google news, do something, leave. Where Google does not excel is in making applications that are by their nature for lingering and luxuriating -- the so-called social applications. Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and Quora are the lobster traps that catch millions of consumers and make them stay. Facebook is a lobster trap and your friends are the bait. On social networks we are all lobsters, and lobsters just wanna have fun. Every time a friend shares a status, a link, a like, a comment, or a photo, Facebook has more bait to lure me back. Facebook is literally filled with master baiters: Whenever I return to Facebook I am barraged with information about many friends, to encourage me to stick around and click around. Every time I react with a like or comment, or put a piece of content in, I'm serving as Facebook bait myself. Facebook keeps our friends as hostages, so although we can check out of Hotel Facebook any time we like, we can never leave. So we linger. And we lurk. And we luxuriate. The illogical extreme of content-as-bait are the Facebook games where the content is virtual bullshit. Social apps are lobster traps; Google apps do not bait users with their friends. Of course, Google users still use Facebook and Facebook users still use Google. But at the end of the day, they provide two different, but overlapping toolsets. Read more at googlewatch.eweek.com

 

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