Hitwise numbers reported last week by Barry Levine in Sci-Tech Today, indicated that for the first time, Facebook not Google was the dominant driver of traffic to the Internet.
He captured this fact in a great phrase: Facebook is now the center of gravity for the Internet.
This is really a significant shift. No longer is search what drives the majority of internet users to launch their browsers in the morning, but it is now replaced by the need to go to our Facebook pages, visit and get our information from our communities. And undoubtedly hang out online longer and be social.
Is the big change here that we choose social over search? Obviously the numbers don’t lie and now Facebook leads as the driver of online activity. But this goes deeper and speaks to how we are finding information online and from a different vantage point. I’ve blogged on the shift to the power of our networks here and the wisdom of the community here.
Think about Facebook for a moment. We choose our friends, populate our communities and determine the content of the Facebook Newsfeed we see. For myself, the Newsfeed is my principal information source for many topics. New post by Fred Wilson…there. New post by friend Mark Essel…there. What’s new in the wine world…there. Tech news, art news, world views, silly points of views…all there in the feed from trusted folks I’ve chosen to allow into my community.
Most every topic that I’m interested in is in my feed when I log in for my first click of the morning and many times during the day. This personalized channel doesn’t miss much and it is constantly changing as I join clubs, add friends and post myself.
This information and news is all in-network, all referral, all from trusted sources that I allow to be displayed. With the new numbers from Hitwise and the astounding fact that 500,000 a day are joining Facebook, I’m presuming that the majority of people on the web daily are doing the same thing. Determining their communities, getting information from friends and doing just what I do. Which is in essence personalizing the information they see and adjusting the filters of who they trust.
The big question for me is not why we are there or what we are doing. But where does the search function live and what does it look like moving forward? Certainly with communities as the majority base, search can’t remain extant from those communities, with importance and popularity determined externally.
We search for information. It’s a natural state that drove us to Google originally. For data. For dictionary understanding. For all the stuff that inspires our imagination. Our hunger for facts.
Search is essential but importance ranking or popularity of information shouldn’t be determined impersonally. My community should be determining link popularity, not the open web and keyword densities.
Great questions are starting to surface:
-Where is the search function going to live? Are we going to have to leave the community and go elsewhere to get answers?
-Is the search mechanism itself going to start taking the preferences and the value of the community into consideration on what is trusted or more important?
-And is search going to be a function of Facebook? Of Google? Something completely new like Hunch? Or a hybrid?
It seems that the numbers from Hitwise are stating a priority. And that priority is community. Likewise, it’s logical that social and community search are the next steps. We simply require that our communities become the new filters.
To me these are the critical questions that the shift from Google to Facebook dominance raise.
Search we must have but personalized and community filtered and centered it must become.
The answers to these questions are unknown as yet… but they are interesting and important and will change the online experience as they work themselves out.
