Speed for Need: Likes vs. Links

7:37 am - Mon, May 24, 2010: 14 notes

Speed for Need: Likes vs. Links

Excerpt from an email I wrote a month ago regarding Facebook’s Global Like and Google. Names have been removed to protect the disruptive. Was going to expand this into a proper post, but the raw idea was good enough (ie. I’m too lazy to write it and it’s been sitting in my queue for a month).

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In an intent obsessed internet economy, user needs are represented by actions, and actions are measured by impact. In the sharing ecosystem, the action is the sharing mechanism and the impact is the social and channel dispersion of the engagement. As far as social gestures go, a “like” represents a much lighter need than a shorten/share or cut/paste, which is the entire point behind the Global “Like” - there’s a market for people to share on impulse without friction. The most viral safe form of sharing and tracking is the URL, and as a standardized protocol, it can go wherever the distributed social web takes it and becomes accretive via annotation, inheriting mass and velocity ie. momentum - across Facebook, Twitter, SMS, smartphones, IM, email where the score is ultimately tallied via search engine ranking. There can be massive impact from sharing via open protocols as the dispersion is frictionless. Likes have less initial friction by way of platform handling the heavy lifting - one click and you’re done, no annotating, no cutting and pasting, no decision to be made, pure impulse gesture - but it is limited to one network virally speaking and further limited by the hurdles, perils and confusion of privacy in your private/public network within Facebook.

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By shadowing or removing links from the most vibrant areas of the sharing ecosystem on the internet, Facebook is rotating the most monetizable market share away from the link economy where Google wins to the private social sharing economy where Facebook wins. The internet chess match has been set for us. Everything Google does is to expand the internet pie - the more links out there, the larger the internet, the more they can monetize from their dominant position in search. Everything Facebook is doing is to reduce the internet pie - the more links they can remove from the open internet and rotate into their private platform, the more they can monetize from their dominant position as a walled garden.