A Blog About Making Culture
google's first mistake
February 16, 2003
So, yeah, everybody's gonna be buzzing about Google buying Pyra, but my take is that it's not really that great a fit.
Of course, Google bought Deja, which is the closest parallel as far as their acquisitions go. But Deja archived everything in Usenet, and Blogger only encompasses a part of the blogosphere. Granted, it's probably close to half, but relegating the incredibly intricate network of LiveJournal users and the aggregator-powered Radio users and the thought leaders who use Movable Type (including, amusingly, Gillmor himself, who broke the story) to second-class citizens seems like a critical misstep for Google's path so far.
More to the point, Google's consistent marketing message so far has been, "We do search, and we don't want to be a portal". My relationship with Pyra and Blogger goes back a long, long way and their tool has always seemed to be about creation of content.
Also, on a slight tangent, Google's never run a service that requires users to pay. Blogger Pro and all of the variations of BlogSpot Plus, not to mention BloggerDomains and whatever other auxiliary services Pyra offers, are all for-pay services, and though it's possible that Google is going to try to turn those users into people who pay for additional features from Google in the future, the reality is that it puts Google into a far different role than they've had so far.
The most relevant quote by Gillmor, to me is when he says, "The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and information." I think competitors like LiveJournal, Nick Denton's Lafayette Project, Userland and Movable Type could be bigger winners long-term, or at least could be as big winners from this.
In all though, a very impressive deal. Congrats to Ev and the gang for pulling it off, and for broadening Google's vision. It'll be interesting to note what effect it has on Blogger's reliability and scalability. Back when Blogger was hacked, Steve sent me an indignant refutation of my assertion that the problem was with the development of weblog tools. His defense, which is entirely valid, is that the vulnerabilities tend to be in the platform software itself, and that it was to blame for most of the problems. It seemed kind of like he was saying "blame Rudy, not me!" while being too polite to actually say that out loud.
Now that the platform is moving to a presumably much more robust infrastructure, it'll be interesting to see what effect that has on the services they offer in the future. My sense is that weblogs as a whole are more valuable than any one platform, tool, or community of weblogs. Once Google's plan becomes clearer, it'll be possible to see whether Google's adoption of part of the blogosphere is prescient or unfortunately incomplete.
Previously: beyond power laws
barkingmoose
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Gblogger: Well, crikey: Google bought Blogger. This is tremendously interesting news. Let's look at it from both sides: What does it read more »Monkey X - Hairy Thoughts
Salon near death / Blogger bought by Google: Two unrelated stories hit the press this weekend. The first, Salon may be facing failure and the second Google bought Pyra Labs, the guys behind Blogger. There's a lot of reaction on the latter by Ben Hammersley. Anil Dash, Joi Ito, Jeremy Zawodny and ... read more »Bryce's Weblog Experiments
0wn3d by G00g13: I suspect that the real story behind Google's purchase of Pyra is that Google really does want to be a portal, just not in the all-encompassing Yahoo sense of the word. read more »Nicklas Koski
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Validation - Google Buys Pyra: When Google buys Blogger, it says that some new things now matter. Google has the highest 'PageRank' in the world read more »the good doctor
Dash on Google-Blog: anil dash - google's first mistakeI've been reading some, and only some, of the news of the Blogger buyout. While read more »Backup Brain
Bloogle: Headline: Google Buys Pyra Okay, now that I've read a bunch of people variously pontificating, punditizing, and frothing at the read more »There Is Nothing To Not Be Amazed At
Ain't Too Proud To Beg:: I was a bit surprised, when I read the Google buys Pyra article. Based on what Evan Williams have said read more »Editor: Myself (Persian)
What EV and others say about Google aquiring Blogger: ببينيم اوان ويليامز، رييس پيرا، درباره‌ی اينکه Ú¯ÙˆÚ¯Ù„ شرکتش را read more »Consolation Champs
Google Buys Blogger: This is already old news, but Google has bought Pyra, the company behind the Blogger service. I won't pretend to read more »Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog
Bloogle: Google buys Pyra, the company behind Blogger. Dan Gillmor: Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time Tony Pierce: Account of the read more »Hunting The Muse
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So Google bought Blogger...: Da hat Google also Blogger/Pyra gekauft und kein Mensch weiß warum. Ich werde nicht versuchen, zu erklären, was der "wirkliche" Grund ist (kenne ich den? Gibt es einen?), das haben read more »d o t - c o m a *:o)
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This is big. Real big.: Google bought Pyra (the makers of Blogger). I'm so excited to see what happens next. Maybe I *will* stay with Blogger for a while longer yet...... Boing Boing covers the news here, here, and here. More discussion here: Anil, Kottke,... read more »MonkeyX - Hairy Thoughts
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BloGoogle: So Google has bought Blogger (and Pyra, the company running it). I’m not even sure where to go with this. Yeah, it’ll be good for folks on this side, putting Blogger on more powerful servers, and really good for the... read more »david
I don’t really know anything, but my guess is that Google got a bargain. How much cash was Ev sitting on?
Google can write it off as an R&D purchase. They can use their 100% (I’m assuming) access to the Blogger content and back-end to beta test news, micropublishing, and comment searching. When these tools are mature, they can roll them out publicly.
If nothing else, Blogger is the biggest blogging company with a revenue stream and a strong brand. No one calls it “Moveable Typing,” even if that’s what the kids are into nowadays.
Anil
All good points. The part I just can’t get past, however, is "Google’s mission is to deliver the best search experience on the Internet by making the world’s information universally accessible and useful."
That just doesn’t click with this.
Dan Hartung
Surely once they properly integrate PostRank technology into the search function, we will all be able to successfully, quickly search for the Harry Potter vibrating broomstick story. It’s win-win!
Tim
You ever think that it might be altruism? Maybe they’ll just leave Pyra as a stand-alone business. Unlikely, but I bet it didn’t cost them very much, and it is the kind of thing I can imagine Eric Schmidt doing.
Thanks, Tim
P.S. You were right about a Berkeley Gawker. How about a Berkeley city blog? (http://www.berkeleyblog.com)
Tim Lutero
Minor nit: Google Answers is a for-pay service. But I don’t know how much of the cost goes to Google versus the researchers. I don’t use it, anyway.
If I use Movable Type, does that make me a thought leader? Maybe I’ll switch to Xanga.
I agree, as most people would, that any “Bloggle” index would have to be inclusive of all weblog tools. Nobody has mentioned bbt, b2, greymatter, ad nauseum.
Robert Sayre
Seems to me that acquiring Blogger jives pretty well with Google’s mission. Part of making information accessible for Google’s users is getting it on the Internet in the first place. Diverse content sources make Google’s service more valuable.
Nick
I’m not sure of the logic behind Google’s purchase of Pyra. I’m even less sure why Ev (and all the others Pyra) decided this was the way to go.
How will Blogger/Pyra fit into Google’s current strategy? I’m not sure if it does? Although they now access to one of the biggest content databases on the internet. Perhaps Google can take Blogger’s development even further than it has already come.
I just hope all the people behind Blogger (past and present) don’t get shafted in this deal.
A better story would’ve been “Pyra buys Google”, now that would have been news.
Anil
Tim, you’re right. Answers and Google’s Ads themselves are for-pay services. But I meant a service that required a general user base to pay to use it. This raises the question of whether Google sees webloggers paying to act as, essentially, self-advertisers.
Every blog entry is a big text ad for meeee.
my take
Excuse me, but my take here is that though a few of you may have some technical or inside knowledge of all this it still comes across like you all (especially the people saying: “I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem like a good fit…” are manufacturing a stance on the spot, and secretly you all ARE buzzing over this. Just my take…
Gina
Good point about Deja, Anil, but I have to say that I definitely am buzzing about this - not that I want any blog created by another tool to be a “second class citizen,” but it’s still so exciting, the thought of a Google search on blogs the way you can search Usenet. I guess I just have too much naive faith in Google, they’ve never made anyone a second-class citizen in their results, and so I imagine any kind of blog search they implement will of course start with Blogger content but also include other-tool-generated blogs, from radio to mt to my very own homegrown thang…. at least I hope.
Bill
The one thing all the commentary so far is focused on are the effect on personal blogs and Google’s current provision of all ‘personal’ services at no charge.
But what no one has mmentioned, and may really be the key, is that Pyra has/is about to have a version of Blogger written more or less completely in Java that can be deployed on any server. The Globo deal was just the tip of the iceberg, they (Ev and Jason) wanted to sell this into corporations for a few $k per server. Combine that with Google search appliance and maybe another odd piece or two and you have a very sophisticated, valuable Intranet addition.
mattpfeff
The part I just can’t get past, however, is “Google’s mission is to deliver the best search experience on the Internet by making the world’s information universally accessible and useful.”
I thought this was their mission, too, and even interpreted the Google News front page mainly as a demonstration piece, to reinforce the message that, Hey, we’re the place to search for news, too. But I also emailed them asking, Is there a simple news search page, like Google’s main front page (or the front pages for Image search, Froogle, and every other dang thing the Googlebot crawls), where I can just plain old search for news items, and not have to wait for that whole front page to load — and the email back was, Nope, no plans for that as yet, but thanks for your thoughts.
So, yeah. I don’t quite know what they’re doing, either.
Anonymous
http://boingboing.net/20030201_archive.html#90330803
Craig Danuloff
I agree that this is about the impact on other companies - those without the vision of google - and the VCs and Angels. Google has the ‘commercial pagerank’ to influence what happens next and they just blessed some cool new stuff, both directly and indirectly. A lot more thoughts at my site.
cam thomas
for how much?
and did meg get any of that coin???
Richard Bennett
I don’t see how this can possibly be good for Denton, although it does confirm that megnut probably has the worst sense of timing in the industry.
I expect the first benefit will come from moving Blogspot to a healthy server farm, since this is one of the things Google really does best, and the next will be an excellent set of blog indexing features that will drive manyh more bloggers to that server farm.
But we’ll see.
Greg
Any bets on if Google changes the Blogger name like the did for Deja? Bloogle anyone?
Massimo Moruzzi
I doubt they’ll change such a successful name. I doubt they’ll favour Blogger over other blogging tools in PageRank. I’m sure happy they bought the company instead of having some AOL, Yahoo! or MSN buy it. I think they’ll be successful both at selling Blogger to the public as a blogging tool and at selling a new, Google Intranet tool to companies. And, finally, I’m pretty confident news and articles from bloggers will soon pop-up among the resources available in Google News! :-)
Ian
Now for the real speculation:
Bloggle? Gblogger? Bloogle?
… or just plain “Blogger [powered by Google]”
Massimo Moruzzi
the third one :-)
Charles
Google does also offer the Google Answers as a pay service model, though I don’t know how successful it has been. I’ve used it on a few time-pressed occasions with varying results. eBay research - interesting concept, anyway. There could be benefits to Google above and beyond a typical (if such a thing exists) weblog-tool-for-payment model. They are gaining first-party access to tens of thousands of weblogs, which could enable them to better analyse the way people write on the web - frequencies, language structures, the way people interact with UI, and what types of topics are written about most. It could become a treasure trove of metadata that allows Google to refine their search technologies further and help maintain industry leadership status. Plus there are surely financial reasons for Google to diversify its holdings and do different types of R&D (if that is indeed what they have in mind.)
Ten Reasons Why
Theory: Google is not interested in taking on Movable Type, LiveJournal, etc. Google IS interested in taking on Blogdex, Daypop, etc….and perhaps CNN, NYTimes, Washington Post as well.
Ev estimates ~200,000 ACTIVE bloggers (out of 1.1 million registered users). We can presume that the association with the world’s #1 search engine will increase those users (at least in the short-term).
Having the capacity to index those Google-Blogger blogs AS THEY POST (instead of having to spider the sites), gives them a jump on ranking the popular links…they can then direct the spiders more efficiently to check other non-Blogger blogs for the presumed high-ranking links. That could create a blog index that is more representative (time-wise) of the actual posts out there.
Also, Tony Pierce points out (http://www.tonypierce.com/blog/20030216_blogarc.htm#90331511) that webloggers are getting better at breaking news — or, more specifically, SPREADING news that just broke — than other news sites. Having a significant percentage of webloggers “inside the firewall” may give Google the sampling they need to direct their news spiders and have Google News become the most up-to-date news source around (if it isn’t already).
It seems to me like Blogger may give Google a way to get speedier on some non-webpage-search fronts.
Joe Grossberg
At the risk of oversimplifying:
Blogger sucks. I tried it. I hated it: too many bugs, their servers were constantly down, their website had broken links, etc. I switched to MovableType.
Google rules. I tried it. I’ve never looked back.
What I’m wondering is not Blogger’s impact on Google, but the other way around — with Blogger’s quality zoom light years ahead to the level of Google’s user experience?
Joe http://www.joegrossberg.com
Brendon
Well, I’ve used Blogger since March 2000 and, yes, there WERE intermittent downtimes in the beginning. But overall, I’ve been more than happy with Blogger. Their main obstacle has been creating an easy to use tool for folks who don’t understand HTML, FTP and web hosting (this is probably Livejournal or Radio Userland’s niche).
Ev and his crew rock. A LOT of dumb money was thrown around during the dot-com dayz. They deserve to make some cash off one of the truly innovative web applications out there.
Charlie
For one thing, it is good that Google bought it - they can handle it better.
What I wonder is how does a search engine know something is a blog???
Boring Me
Okay, so let me get this straight. One minute Google is the well-loved, well-praised lovechild of the Internet. And the next minute, all respect is out the door for having bought out Blogger?
Who cares if this deal doesn’t fall under Google mission statement? Like all solid businesses, Google probably identifies the need to evolve. United is now trying to focus on the low-fare market. Amazon went into apparel and restaurant menus. Orbitz is looking into hotel bookings.
And, now, Google wants to blog. Good for them for thinking outside the box.
Frank Ruscica
Google + Blogger = Go_Ogle, the Mother of All Online Dating Sites
Here’s how I think it will happen:
First, Google will improve the searchability of the “blogosphere” by making it easy for bloggers to append a file containing information about themselves and their blogger friends. This information will be encoded in an RDF dialect called FOAF (Friend of a Friend).
Soon after, it will start to dawn on people that the FOAF file is effectively a static online profile, while the associated blog is akin to a living profile (in the ‘living document’ sense).
One tipping (i.e. inflection) point later, usage of Google by date seekers will grow to an such extent that our (grand)children will read about it in their history texts. Online dating is at 26M users and growing, after all.
Google will then acquire the best RDF query toolmakers and launch Go_Ogle, the mother of all online dating sites.
Once Go_Ogle is in place, the possibilities are absolutely mind-googling :^)
More on this, including a pointer to foundational code for GPLed Go_Ogle, at www.opportunityservices.com.
Thoughts?
Enjoy,
Frank Ruscica
Founder The Opportunity Services Group :: Have Fun to Get Ready www.opportunityservices.com
Tom
I hope develop blog solution with Jsp and Mysql. Please give me your teaching
Hero
Innouncement!!!
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