Mike Arrington has a good post today on how social media today is a lot like search was 10 years ago. You can read it here. In it, he notes

“The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way.

Everything is decentralized, and no one is working to centralize stuff. I’ve got photos on Flickr, Posterous and Facebook (and even a few on MySpace), reviews on Yelp (but movie reviews on Flixster), location on Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, status updates on Facebook and Twitter, and videos on YouTube. Etc. I’ve got dozens of social graphs on dozens of sites, and trying to remember which friends puts his or her pictures on which site is a huge challenge.

And the amount of spam and just general nonsense that is flooding all of these services is crippling. As a user, I spend far too much time weeding it all out to find the few gems of real content from people I care about.”

He then goes on to call for someone to organize it:

“Someone will eventually help us make sense of all these various types of services, and help us separate the noise and spam from the real signal. I don’t know who’s going to do it, and I certainly don’t know how (if I did, I’d be doing it, not writing about it). But at some point soon, one of the Internet giants, or some new startup we’ve never heard of, is going to fix this mess for us.”

While I agree with both of his points, I don’t think figuring out the when and who is that difficult. I’m willing to confidently predict that the social media space will be organized in the next two years, and that it will be done by either Facebook or Google. The reason I have such confidence in this prediction is simple. Facebook and Google are the only two companies that have both the computing power, and the ability to collect the information necessary to actually organize the social space. Actually collecting the social information on is the first, and larger, problem. Here, Facebook has a huge advantage over Google, because it’s the largest social network in the world. However, it’s only a relative advantage. Google is a close second in the amount of information it collects. The second problem is that actually organizing the world’s social graph is a large-scale computational problem that is even more difficult than organizing the world’s web pages. Now, I was extremely impressed with the amount of technical energy I felt at Facebook when I visited there campus for the Hip Hop for PHP event, but Google still has a huge advantage in computing resources and skill. Google’s basic computational infrastructure is far ahead of Facebook’s, and indeed anyone else’s infrastructure..
So, out of these two, who would I bet on? I’d make Google the 2-1 favorite. But, as we saw in the Superbowl yesterday, favorites don’t always win.

Here’s my quick take on HipHop for PHP that was posted by Larry at ZDNet. I’m attending the HipHop event tonight, and I will add more about it later.

I’ve been playing with Google Chrome extensions, and I’m impressed by how easy they are to create. It took me about 5 minutes to alter an example, and create one that provides links to the latest ZDNet Blog posts. Should you be interested, you can download it here.

The web is abuzz today over Google’s announcement that they have acquired Teracent. Teracent offers a technology to optimize display ads for click-thru in the same way that Google optimizes text ads. Teracent’s secret sauce is it’s ability to mix and match graphical elements to design new ads and then optimize their delivery. As Andy Beal puts it, it’s “multi-variate testing for your banner ads.” But multi-variate testing to what purpose? The only response Teracent can measure is clicks; so that’s what they measure. That’s fine if you are focused on direct response from your display ads, but in that case you are better off buying text ads. Text ads are cheaper, and likely just as, if not more effective.

Traditionally, display advertising has been about brand awareness. Unfortunately, there’s no direct way to measure that, and so it’s ignored by Teracent. My (relatively uninformed) guess is that Teracent will optimize these display ads towards those that have a direct call to action. If what the advertiser wants is a direct action that’s fine. But, if you want to launch a brand with this kind of display ads, then this kind of optimization won’t work.

Hey, MobKool is available on the Kindle. Sign up here, and pay money for something you can read for free, but in a much less pretty format. I will really appreciate it.

Well, the FTC has just laid down a new policy requiring bloggers to reveal any payment (or free stuff) they receive to blog about any subject. For details, check out this post from Larry. So, here’s my disclosure. I’m ashamed to have to admit that I am so lacking in influence that nobody has ever given me anything, or paid me, to endorse anything. Too bad I’m not Mager.

What are the limits of fair use on the web? If a journalist or blogger puts a lot of effort into a story, which is then summarized by a much more popular blog, are they being ripped off. Ian Shapiro, of the Washington Post, is debating this question right now in regards to Gawker’s summary of a story he wrote. Here’s the best analysis of the debate I could find: Gawker and the Washington Post: a Case Study in Fair Use.

Here’s an email I just received from Google Adsense:

Dear Publisher,

We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.

We’re focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. We’re bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we’ll continue to launch new products and features. We’re also continuing to improve our offerings for AdWords advertisers, making it easier for them to target the Google content network. Features for advertisers, such as the new display ad builder, are designed to improve ad performance on AdSense publisher sites.

We’ll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of AdSense lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.

Sincerely,

Kim Scott
Director AdSense Online Sales & Operations

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

If they really want to reassure me, they should just tell me what the split is on my ad clicks.

UPDATE: If I was a real blogger here’s the kind of post I would have written about this email.

See Twitter has a new look.

Check out Jeff Jarvis’s post Google: Monopoly or Marketplace where Jeff claims that Google is not a monopoly, while describing it in a way that clearly indicates it is. The collapse of Yahoo has left Google in total control of the search advertising market. If you run a commercial website of any kind, you have to get up every morning and worry about what Google is doing to you, and you have no recourse. Google raises rates on adwords: you have no recourse. Google cuts your share of revenue on text ads on your site: you have no recourse. You have no recourse, because Google has no viable competitors. No viable competitors means they have a monopoly. And, no amount of dancing around the issues by bloggers like Jeff Jarvis will change that fact.