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tech news Only Connect: The Google-Pyra Deal
Why did Google buy Pyra, whose Blogger software launched a thousand weblogs? Could blogs, rich in connections to other sites, be the "killer app"?Whatever happened to the “killer app,” that elusive software application that promised to revolutionize the online world (at least in Silicon Valley hyperbole)? Google's recent purchase of Pyra Labs may be the answer. Entrepeneurs more concerned with commerce than conversation may raise a skeptical eyebrow, but some Netwatchers believe the blog just might be the killer app. At first glance, the reason for Google’s acquisition seems obvious: Google is the Net's leading search engine; Pyra created Blogger, a popular service that enables users to create and publish the online soapboxes known as weblogs, or blogs. Google's acquisition gives the search engine (which already indexes over three billion Web pages) direct access to Pyra’s roughly nine million link-rich blog posts. And, because blogs are typically updated daily, the acquisition helps Google to maintain the “freshness” of its links. But some Web critics and well-known bloggers believe Google’s purchase will affect more than just the quantity of pages to which the search engine connects. “[Google and Pyra] have realized that the fundamental unit of the Web isn't the link, but the trail,” wrote Matt Webb, Web critic and blogger at interconnected.org, the day after Google's February 15 purchase of Pyra. Improvements to Google’s features, according to Webb, could possibly include better ways to navigate the Web, based on other websurfers' trails---their movements around the Web, from site to site. In other words, by purchasing a blog-publishing service that “owns” the interlinked conversations of over 1,000,000 people, Google will possess the ability to trace the well-worn paths that users follow when surfing the Web---and to offer those paths as optional “street maps” to its users. Imagine you wanted to find information on Trent Lott: You’d query Google, but instead of getting a list of links ranked by popularity, you would get a list of links based on other Internet surfers' step-by-step searches for Trent Lott-related information.
Google has thus far kept silent about the reasons behind its buyout of Pyra. Evan Williams, co-founder of Pyra Labs, offered only a few enigmatic words on his personal blog, evhead.com: “For Blogger, and for Blogger users, [the buyout] is going to mean great things. We're going to be mapping out more clearly what that means and talking about it soon. We don't mean to be mysterious about that. We just haven't had time to put it all together yet.” Google would be well-advised to take advantage of its purchase soon; the blog’s popularity as an information medium is such that Google isn’t the only company that’s trying to distill meaning from the millions of sites. Meg Hourihan, the other co-founder of Pyra Labs (she left the company in 2001) is collaborating with writer/blogger Nick Denton to create a top-secret blog-connecting software program, code-named The Lafayette Project. If all goes as planned, Hourihan and Denton’s software will also give contextual meaning to the millions of cross-linked blogs that, taken as an interconnected whole, form the so-called “blogosphere.” Contextual meaning, in this case, means that the Lafayette Project Web site would recommend other blogs for you, based up your favorite blogs. The process would be analogous to the personalization system at work in Amazon.com’s "customers who bought this book also bought" feature. “I see [The Lafayette Project] as Blogdex meets Amazon meets Friendster,” said Hourihan, referring to three sites that, respectively, rank blog conversations, recommend purchases, and match singles. Unlike Google, she said, “[i]t’s for when you're looking for something that's interesting but you don't know what it is.” Both Google’s and Hourihan’s blog-related projects evidence the rising popularity of weblogs and, as a result, the increasing need to distill the millions of chaotic blog conversations on the Net into digestible portions. The service that can do this most effectively will, to some, have created the killer app. RELATED LINKS Pyra Labs - Creators of the Blogger weblog publishing service Interconnected.org - Home of Matt Webb, Net critic Evhead.com - Personal blog of Evan Williams, co-founder of Pyra Labs Megnut.com - Personal blog of Meg Hourihan, the other co-founder of Pyra Labs and developer of The Lafayette Project NickDenton.org - Personal blog of Nick Denton, co-developer of The Lafayette Project. Stephen Bryant is a graduate student of journalism at NYU and co-managing editor of ReadMe. As a freelance writer, he covers the Web, new media and technoculture for publications such as Spin. |
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