Mummy are we there yet?

In the past few years I’ve written couple of posts about the opportunities and challenges of search through people (rather than through better algorithm). Couple of quick wins I had recently through my network reminded me to revisit this topic as the last post I wrote was pre-twitter/facebook.

Quick recap – search as we know it still has more muscles than brain. You google something and get 3 zillion results in 0.14 second and now you have to start searching the results. So effectively, when you google something all you get is a massive filing cabinet which you still need to go through in order to find what you’re looking for. It’s easy when you’re looking for a very specific, encyclopedic kind of information (bio of Mozart) but not so easy when you’re looking for nice hotel in Barcelona or a solution for your unique DIY problem.

The idea that for every question I have, someone somewhere has the answer is fairly obvious, yet very appealing. The challenge of connecting me to this someone has a business potential comparable to cheap renewable energy. Few steps in this direction were taken in the past with google and Yahoo answers but these prove somewhat futile (although i must admit that ironically, yahoo answers comes up high on google search…).

The challenge is overcoming basic human motivation hurdle that stem from the asymmetry between the person’s need for an answer and the other(s) who might know that answer. It’s natural to drop everything in time of need and fire up a question to the air, but how do you get anyone to listen and respond? You cannot expect everyone to sit all day and wait for someone to ask them a question they might know the answer for…

The solution then, must come through networks and communities. LinkedIn created their own version which seem to work better (anyone has some data??). Within a community some rules apply:

1. The more people are attached to the group, the more likely they are to contribute

2. People will have stronger motivation to contribute when their contribution is recognized and the benefit they provide to an individual or the collective is made salient.

The most recent and interesting development as far as I can tell is Lazy Tweet:

The idea with LazyTweet is to embrace and extend the questions being asked on Twitter, progressively enhancing Twitter discussions, with the lowest friction possible, while opening those questions up to a wider audience. Think of this as Yahoo! Answers for Twitter

Here lies the problem: thinking of it as Yahoo Answers for Twitter negates the idea of a community to some extant and therefore, I believe, will hinder it’s success. The benefit of taking the idea of better search through people to Twitter has solved one big problem of immediacy – having these random questions on your twitter stream increases the chance for someone to notice.

On the other hand, the volume of questions on your stream (if you follow @lazytweet) is getting a bit disproportionate and out of context (at least for someone like myself who cannot follow more than 120 people or I’ll start losing context and interest very quickly) and it’s becoming counter productive to the project and it brings us to square one – community and context. My educated guess is that your chances to get an answer from your close network (the people who follow you) is higher than getting it from the people who follow @LazyTweet and this is not a big surprise.

Better search through people – are we there yet? Not really but we’ve made a good step forward with the rising popularity of social networks. I now think that the google way will win. Our salvation will probably come from a kick ass algorithm of the semantic web.

What ya think?

Few recent search frustrations reminded me that with all the massive development in social media (read, the internets), search functionalities feel somehow legging behind. I’m sure Google, yahoo and Microsoft are pouring millions on development but that doesn’t (yet) change the feeling that it’s time for search to be smarter.

Couple of weeks ago Udy rightly noted how anachronistic it is that when you search something on google or any other search engine, you still gets 25,878,765 results in 0.3 seconds. wow. that’s so 90′s

Recently Google Answer has been shut down and as far as I know, the fate of Yahoo! Answer is quite similar (although there was one significant difference between them – google was a paid-for service while Yahoo!’s is free and open to all to ask and answer, and not surprisingly it is full of crap and stupid questions).

Now LinkedIn created the same application a couple of weeks ago. Question is, why would the people behind LinkedIn will venture into something that the two giants have unmitigatedly failed?

IMHO LinkedIn have a good chance to succeed because there is purpose and cause in creating such application for professional networking community (side-note: recently I’m getting a bit noxious when I hear this word…it’s way way overused by bloggers and clients alike -everybody wants a community…read more here ). While LinkedIn got rid of two key barriers – unlike google’s it’s a free service and unlike Yahoo!’s it is much more community based service than the amorphous open-to-all previous services – their success is not guaranteed.

There still exist the #1 challenge to “better search through people”, i.e. the motivation to contribute.

Stop for a second and seriously ask yourself – why would I take 5-15 min off in the middle of the day, log on to LinkedIn and see if someone posted a question I might be able to answer?

Drawing on some lessons from social psychology, there are two key motivators in group context:

1. People will have stronger motivation to contribute when their contribution is recognized and the benefit they provide to the collective is made salient.

Take Amazon reviews system. People write reviews (of their free will) and the rating system is used to identify amazon’s most helpful reviewers. It’s a system that allows the development of some hierarchy and status of contributors. Both Yahoo! answers and now LinkedIn are using the same mechanism in the forms of numbers and stars.

2. The more people are attached to the group, the more likely they are to contribute

That makes obvious sense and you can see this underlying psychological mechanism in every vibrant community based forum – passionate people who have a strong internal sense of motivation to contribute, rather than some external motivator in the form of points and stars, becasue they strongly feel that a successful outcome of the group is also their own.

The linkedIn interface is somewhere in between and draws on both assumptions. I think that the success of this service is depends on it’s ability to create a sense of community by staying fairly confined in professional categories and sub-categories. Naturally, I cannot be bothered with people who needs help on governmental policies and stuff. Even marketing as a category is too wide a category to motivate me to check in the questions and see if I can help.