There’s Something Happening Here

After the slightly psychedelic guitar intro supposedly reminiscent of a police siren, Buffalo Springfield’s famous song begins, “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” Written in the 60’s by Stephen Stills, most associate the iconic song with the Vietnam War, but it appears to speak not to that but protests that took place on the Sunset Strip during the same time. And while, singer and songwriter probably were not the first to use those two sentences together, they have now memorialized them in a way that makes for apt description of almost any revolution, even this digital one. That’s where we find ourselves now. We know something is going on, but for the past two years, we didn’t know exactly what. Today, it’s still very much unclear, but as the song says, “There’s battle lines being drawn,” and that is what we finally start to get a better sense of in one of the biggest digital battlefronts – the new search.

It doesn’t take Facebook’s impending $100bn IPO or almost other worldly time spent on site to tell you there is something there. What we struggled with though was not so much the valuation but how it could impact the world of search. We saw Google’s deal with MySpace, where they paid hundreds of millions of dollars to be the search provider. It was a magnificent failure that surprised no one except the executives at MySpace who really wanted to see that deal continue. The issue besides the quality of the user was the inherent problem that people do not do the equivalent of B2B behavior when on social sites. When we search, we perform queries that often have a transactional nature. We use search to go from need to solution. Search on social is not search but a display ad – something to click and do.

If there is such a thing as a hybrid between search and social on social, it’s Zynga. The game company has nothing to do with search as we typically use the term. Search in this case is really about audience monetization and being on the upper end of the monetization spectrum per user. Zynga’s brilliance, perhaps unexpectedly, is that it figured out how to extract large amounts of money from a meaningful subset of social users. We poo pooed them initially until we saw how they hooked middle America on the games and had them making purchases as though it was jewelry from QVC instead of tractors for farms. It was a real business, but in the overall scheme of monetizing social, it was still an iteration not an evolution. Ads though, even selling fans, are not the solution either. Somehow, just as it has always been, it’s been about the data.

We have long loved the idea of Facebook becoming an ad network, but even if they wanted to use their like data to create a different type of keyword, that is a big idea but not a transformational one. It could challenge Google and others for display dollars, but it doesn’t come closer to creating the better web experience. It was the better web experience that made Google, Google in our mind. The means by which they do so today has become so commonplace, that we forget just how much better the web with Google is than the web without Google. That’s where Facebook needs to be, not something that everyone sort of uses (some much more seriously than others), but a product that we can’t imagine not having in our online lives.

The other genius of Google besides making a web we can’t live without was doing so in an area that had such natural monetization. Our vision for Facebook (or more broadly for social) is to create a framework where today’s search cannot. That is all about the relationships and interaction. In one of the simplest examples, and thus why we like it, Facebook in theory has the power to add context. It can help us know who our friends use for services and help us decide some of the most important decisions of our lives, big and small. Facebook could become our life engine – not just the place where we browse content but use all the layers of interaction to make life better. Where to eat, how to get that special table; who to use for moving, what places to consider moving into, etc. Facebook could become a more rich search experience and if it monetizes like search, then the sky’s the limit. Just as Microsoft was the OS for computers and Google the OS for the web, Facebook could become the OS for whatever the heck we call this thing that is happening here.