Man Bites Blog

Mark Cuban writes about how Facebook and Twitter may compete with Google.

I’m not so sure. (Kidding!)

More seriously, for what Cuban describes, Twitter and Facebook take one technological step back from what Google does.  A Google PageRank represents the aggregation of thousands of individual user preferences.  Whereas a Twitter network represents the preferences of people I have actively chosen.    Twitter gets you closer to the raw data, and allows you, rather than Google, to determine its weight.

It seems to me people will innately trust the more human solution.  If I’m looking for a mechanic or a doctor, I’d ask my friends for reommendations before I’d see which one had the highest Google PageRank.  It also seems a more human network will be more responsive to new information.  If a previously trusted source does something to destroy that trust, my suspicion is that this information would be more quickly processed by my trusted human network than by the Google PageRank algorithm.

I think there’s a place for both models — I’m more a fan of discovering information than having it pushed to me, but I think people are always going to trust actual humans they know more than a ranking algorithm, regardless of how smart that algorithim is.  So Cuban may on to something.

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