Twitter's hostility is explained by the termination of its agreement with Google to provide search results "in real time", including Facebook status updates; the agreement expired last July and was not renewed. The critical voices have stressed the drawbacks such a move might bring to the legendary impartiality of Google's results, governed by the icy logic of the PageRank algorithm, a ruthless calculation of a site's incoming and outgoing links that turns into a crescendo of mind-boggling mathematical complexity. Google's boast – and its defence against all possible objections to its coveted results 'classification' – has always been the absence of the human hand throughout the process. Pure mathematics, no emotion, no conditioning, we are not Yahoo, you know!
Judging, however, by the other day's announcement, things have changed on the Internet and taken a turn that Mountain View had not expected, or not to this degree at least. Like all radical changes, it comes from afar and was by no means generated in just the last few months. The astonishing popularity of Facebook and Twitter is merely the latest and most spectacular sign but the cracks had already started to appear with the explosion of blogs, justifiably nicknamed "human portals"; with the Amazon recommendation system, which tells buyers which books were purchased by others who bought the same one they have put in their baskets; and with LinkedIn, which even before Facebook took off was creating networks linking professionals in new ways. These services meant the information on the Web was once again being forcefully mediated by people, who had examined, recommended and forwarded it to others and it made no difference if it was blog info, the title of a book or a CV. The "human filter", i.e. word-of-mouth circulated by technological means that multiplied its effect out of all proportions, began to appear on the scene, facilitating the creation of the complex set of services and technology renamed Web 2.0. Only the detached actions of PageRank could bring order and hierarchy to such unmanageable chaos, allowing people to find the most out-of-the-way and fragmentary contents. Paradoxically, the seed of change was already right there and has now started to grow, fostered by the Google announcement. The Internet balances started to shift ever so slightly and the odds were beginning to weigh in favour of Facebook and social networks in general. All the more often, we open a webpage because it was recommended by someone and not because it came up on a search engine.
Links on Twitter, Facebook and all the other services that enable us to share contents online are generating huge quantities of Internet traffic. Yes, the interaction between engines and social networks is highly complex and Google's role remains crucial but, in this passage from a network that links documents to one that links people – as it was described by Paul Adams, a former Google employee, in his recent Grouped –, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is way ahead of the two former Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who changed the way we use the Internet forever in 1997. The current situation is far from ideal because, like every Internet phenomenon, social networks have also proliferated uncontrollably and reliable recommendations have given way to a scenario in which 'grey' areas abound and the unscrupulous use of marketing techniques often making the "human filter" virtually useless because it is disguised advertising and hence all the more insidious. Google had no choice, it had to open its engine up to social networks. After a potential agreement with Facebook vanished because the latter formed an alliance with Bing, the Microsoft search engine, Google decided to go it alone and build its own world that would attract users and offer them everything they needed. Almost.
Google is not the first to try. Microsoft had already come up with the idea in 1995, offering the users of its new operating system a closed network – Microsoft Network – with reserved contents; later, with the explosion of the Internet, it firmly tied its Internet Explorer browser to Windows 98. This trounced its rival Netscape Navigator and resulted in a long and complex court case in which it had to defend itself against the accusation of monopoly. It was also the dream of the portals, generalist sites with varied contents and services that multiplied on the Internet between the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Today, the big Internet names are determined to succeed. Unsurprisingly, Facebook is adding new functions to its service so that users have less need to leave it and surf elsewhere. The effectiveness of such a strategy is gauged in terms of stickiness, how long you can keep a user on your website, but the Web has repeatedly shown it is loathe to this kind of approach. "Fenced gardens" do not work in the ecosystem of the Internet, which can instead be likened to the chaotic proliferation of a rain forest, to use the metaphor of journalist and scholar Steven Johnson. Right now, it is hard to say whether Google will be the first to win this risky gamble. Stefania Garassini