I wrote this piece in September 2011. Following the launch of the iPhone in 2008, smartphones were spreading rapidly, and services such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Instagram were fighting it out over how to connect location with social interaction.
At the time, many startups were asking the same question: what comes after search? How do we move from search, where you enter a goal and get an answer, toward a system that lets you encounter information you had not even thought to look for? I saw serendipity and location as two of the keys to that question.
What follows is an English translation of the piece I wrote on September 4, 2011.
2011-09-04
Real Social Can Change the World. But How?
Why Does the Mechanism of Serendipity Matter? A Historical Perspective
“Think big, act small. Deliver small features based on big ideas.” Perhaps that is what we should be doing now. I want to write down a few thoughts based on several clues.
“Backstage at Disrupt, Google’s Marissa Mayer Talks About Future ‘Random Recommendation’ Features”
Marissa Mayer, a regular at TC50 and Disrupt, was a Google SVP responsible in particular for new areas of search involving mobile and location. For some time, she had consistently described location-based search using the keyword “serendipity”—encounters with information that bring unexpected discoveries.
Traditional Google search is essentially a highly goal-oriented activity: you have a purpose, enter words related to that purpose, and receive results ranked by importance. In that sense, “serendipity” seems quite distant from conventional search.
So why does the concept matter?
“Is Location Information Really That Valuable?”
As discussed in the article above—when it comes to real social at TechCrunch, MG Siegler is the person to read—the emergence of smartphones, or broadband mobile computing, has the potential to fundamentally change new forms of search, or information-discovery methods equivalent to search, depending on how effectively they can handle the semantic information associated with location.
That is why Twitter and Facebook have been so enthusiastic about location-based services, why investors currently have such high expectations for Foursquare’s growth, and why Instagram, although originally developed as a location-based medium before settling into a photo-sharing service, still retains location features.
There is a basic momentum behind all of these developments.
The important point is that the experience of entering keywords and browsing the web based on search results does not fit mobile particularly well.
At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that PUSH-based social graphs—Facebook’s Wall and Twitter’s Timeline being the killer applications—are more comfortable and effective as methods of information discovery than PULL-based search behavior.
That is the background.
Even before mobile, serendipitous encounters with information were already becoming more important. PUSH was becoming a normal experience. Haven’t you noticed that you search less often these days?
But once this moves into mobile, another question arises: is the social graph alone really effective enough?
In reality, information filtered merely through friendships is difficult to make meaningful without the context of location.
For example, finding a ramen restaurant through a PULL-based method is not necessarily comfortable or accurate, except when looking for a famous restaurant or a familiar chain. PUSH-based social information is also meaningless if it has no relationship to where you are. Even if you want to go somewhere, you may simply be unable to reach it.
But if the system senses your location and says, “There’s a ramen place your friend recommends right in front of you!”, that has much greater value.
This problem, of course, contains several other problems: how do you detect that someone likes ramen? How do you determine accurately why that information is useful at that particular moment? How do you naturally connect the information that a friend likes ramen with the user’s current state—for example, being hungry and wanting something rich and heavy?
These are problems that still need to be solved.
Why Must Search Change Once People Acquire Smart Mobility?
The range within which people move and the range of their social relationships do not necessarily coincide. And the amount of information provided by a person’s social circle about the entire range of places they might visit is never particularly large.
If you expand your social circle enough to compensate for this, the opposite problem appears: the social graph becomes extremely noisy.
So when thinking about:
Search → Social → ????
we do not necessarily need to approach the question from a social perspective.
Rather, we need to construct an experience that fits naturally with the patterns through which people move and explore information—one that is not merely goal-oriented, but also contains the pleasure and enjoyment of information discovery and offers real value in participating.
In the Japanese market, location-based services such as Colopl are extremely strong. Their evolution clearly began early, and both their service quality and conceptual sophistication are at a very high level.
Unfortunately, however, moving beyond the framework of Japanese feature phones presents difficulties. Location belongs to the real world, and therefore depends on the lifestyles and transportation infrastructure of individual countries. Optimization for Japan’s information environment can sometimes become a disadvantage.
That makes it difficult for these services to become global platforms, although I should add that their potential to do so is by no means low.
At the same time, location-based services and social services using location that originated in Silicon Valley and New York have yet to produce a decisive solution. Mobile AR, which can be regarded as one development of location-based services, is struggling in much the same way.
In an interview at LeWeb, Foursquare’s CEO said, “Foursquare is the poor man’s AR!”
And certainly, a service in which a check-in shares the fact that a person is physically present somewhere can, in a sense, be regarded as a limited form of augmented reality.
Even so, Foursquare has not yet provided an experience, or a distinctive axis of value, strong enough to support continued use on a truly global scale.
Meanwhile, Facebook has been developing a more effective location-sharing system. In a recent update, Facebook Places abandoned the Foursquare-style check-in mechanism. I think this was an excellent decision, and a very good one from the perspective of user experience.
Google has also released Google Circles, a highly distinctive mechanism for information discovery and sharing. Because it is not constrained entirely by the social graph, it may have the potential to move ahead of Facebook.
Apple could also become the strongest player in networking location and social experience. Unfortunately, no decisive move is visible at present, although developments such as deep Twitter integration suggest that it may be preparing something substantial.
The extremely rapid and sharply focused methods being developed by these players represent the mainstream market that those of us working in real social should be targeting.
The question is whether we can build a serendipity system that spreads like a signal fire.
Can we envision it and develop the ability to realize it on a genuinely global scale?
We need to identify a core experience that is “very small, but capable of creating a very large market,” and that can scale rapidly. We also need the ability to conceive and execute a global strategy through the product development of that core experience.
I believe this is the perspective that startups working in real social should have.
After all, nobody in the world has reached the solution yet. Good news!
And the technologies and information we need are beginning to appear right in front of us. Wow!
The question is how to combine them and direct them—like a laser beam—toward a large latent need.
We can Change the World !!
