2003-02-16

Google buy Pyra


Initial thoughts:

- Google recognise the value of weblogging
- Google have also spotting the weblog/Google_News synergy (cf, Nick
Denton)

So given Google know they want to get their smelling-of-angels mits on
parsable weblog data, three ways:

- RSS.. not going to give broad enough coverage, although it'll be
interesting to see what Google and http://feeds.archive.org/ are
converging on. Who is Archive.org? Amazon and AltaVista have a finger
involved there, don't they? [1]

- Winer's idea of pinging Google/all_search_engines every time a weblog
updates, a la weblogs.com. 4 years old, won't fly. The management system
for that alone is comparable to one for a weblogging system, and won't
get enough takeup. Especially because it's not proven.

- Buy a centralised weblogging system -- Blogger or LiveJournal. But LJ
isn't connected enough to the web at large.

Coupled with:
- Blogger's experience with centrally hosted and remotely published
weblogs with a very high number of users
- Blogger's multiple installations (Brazil and India, isn't it?)
- Blogger's then obviously already internationalised (a difficult
problem)

and it makes sense.


What does this mean for Blogger/ Google/ weblogs-at-large/ the www?

For Blogger it's good, obviously. They can stop worrying about tedious
infrastructure and actually get on *building what they've been paid to
build*.

For the rest it depends how Google play it. To be honest, I don't think
Google have any option other that to play it honestly and with
enlightened self-interest.

Google can play to win, or they can operate as part of the ecosystem
(like the BBC would). Looking at the other stuff they do, I don't think
they're a play-to-win company. They build for quality for a very
particular (but broad) niche, and then just happen to win out of that.

And Google obviously understand webloggers. So they've put their neck on
the line, to an extent. If they muck up, they know that there's enough
influence and feeling out there to significantly dent Google's good
name.


In the short term, say three months:
- I think it'll parallel Deja. Immediate move onto better
infrastructure. Slow migration of code.

Medium to long term:
- Whatever Google are playing at, this is just one way of injecting
data. Search is one, Blogger will be one. But to play fair (because of
the ecosystem above), the other ways of getting the data will be
allowed: RSS, ping-to-scrape.


...as to what Google *are* playing at, who knows. Let's start from the
One Box and figure out what they might be doing.


mw -- who *would* post this on his weblog, but Blogger is down...


[1]
In email, Aaron Swartz <http://www.aaronsw.com/> says:

> Archive.org is mostly Brewster Kahle. (Brewster's previous company,
> Alexa, who donates their web crawls to the archive, got bought by
> Amazon tho.) feeds.archive.org appears to be just Bill Kearney.

...which is disappointing, because for a moment I had a really cool
conspiracy theory going.


-- 
more here: http://interconnected.org/notes/2003/02/Google_buy_Pyra_2.txt
the weblog: http://interconnected.org/home/