A small inkling of a thought

Buzz. There's a LOT of it, isn't there?

Anyway, I had to turn it off. Too many distractions in the wrong place. I suspect I'm getting old.

There was a huge chat in the office about it: mostly revolving around engineering culture at google, and how a monoculture can become dangerous. You'll have read the same thoughts on a hundred other blogs already, I'm sure.

One upshot of the whole storm in a teacup is that I think I may stop automatically blurting all of my twitter updates to facebook. I've noticed my twitter frequency creeping up past one a day, and on twitter that's fine: on facebook, not so much. Besides, facebook has things like people I was at school with, and people whose children I babysat when I was 13, and their expectations are very different from mine in these spaces. So. If you want cormorant reports, you'll have to look elsewhere. I think that might be a tiny venn diagram, though.

Anyway, the point of this wittering. Yes.

I was just poking through google reader. I've been harmlessly sharing things there for a while - very unobtrusive, you really had to go and look for the stuff. So sorry if suddenly my random bookmarks are being thrust upon you. Didn't we learn the problem of push back with windows98? It's no better when the people doing the pushing are marginal aquaintaces, rather than corporate marketing departments, unfortunately.

The thing I noticed, though, was this. There I was, very quickly skim-looking a 'most popular on ffffound' feed, when I noticed that a ffffound post had 23 likes within google reader.

So, love has come strongly to Google. They're trying to out-digg digg, by making a digg that suffuses the whole web (sidewiki, reader, etc) at an object level. They can look at the ffffound pages for the activity there, and supplement that with their own love metrics, all cut with their demographic data. It's another way of understanding what's valuable on the web.

Just like links, back in google's original model.

Which makes me wonder: is the link as a measure of value on the web now dead?

In short, are we in danger of SEOing google to death, and is buzz their response to this?

Shrug. Maybe.