Kumar's Blog

This is something Google has been wanting to say for a few years now.

Google launched Google+, integrated it with Hangouts, made it mandatory for businesses to have a profile to improve their performance in search, made it mandatory for authors to have a profile in order for them to see their picture next to their articles in search results, made the user interface more elegant than that of Facebook.

But the activity levels simply refuse to come anywhere near that of Facebook.

After all this effort, they might finally be able to get some traction in matching (and then overtaking Facebook). This is by relying on their primary product, which is search. In fact, Facebook has been making in-roads into this space with its own Graph Search. But Google seems to want to invert (so to say) what Facebook does with Graph Search, and this might actually win over the audience.

Through Graph Search, Facebook allows you to find people who have been to certain places, who have lived in certain cities, who have worked at certain companies, who like certain movies, etc. But still, when in trouble, the first place people go to for information is Google.

Google+ are looking to offer the advantages of Graph Search through their search engine. Whenever you search for some information in Google, most results that turn up are articles (which are written by people). When you search for products/services, the websites of companies that sell them turn up.

Google wants to add a social element to this process of searching and show up an option to contact the author of the post (via Google+) that you find interesting after your search query. Also, a section could highlight people in your Google+ circles who are experts in the area related to your search query. This is beneficial both to the author who is probably looking to establish her authority as a subject matter expert, and to the user who needs more information than is available in the article.

Will this be enough to make you say 'Move over Facebook. I now prefer Google+'?

I make the case for Big Data and the opportunities it offers quite often on this blog. It will make it possible for you to identify and map the usage and behaviour patterns of a lot of people with respect to the products, software services and several other things that they use. Many marketers and business developers have their own plans for using Big Data.

Marketing strategies are being formulated, SEO optimization techniques are being planned, new product ideas are being thought of, advertisements are being scripted, movies are being made, even as I write this. All looking to capitalize on the learnings from Big Data.

The opportunities on offer can be capitalized on only when there is an understanding of what all the data means. It is not at all enough to just know historic patterns and extrapolate them to predict future behaviour. It is unfortunate that many marketers tend to forget the first lesson in Statistics in the excitement of all the opportunities. They tend to forget that correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation.

Technologies are being disrupted in ever quicker cycles. If Apple had mined Big Data about phone usage patterns, they would never have disrupted and made the iPhone.

Big Data is not a replacement for disruptive innovation. You just have to make use of it to aid innovation. Not incremental innovation like adding a small extra feature. That is no good in the long term. But disruptive innovation. You need to understand usage and behaviour patterns not to make more products that will allow the users to continue using these products and services in the same way. All small companies that have become big, overshadowing the existing giants, have done it by disrupting user behaviour and hooking them on to a newer and better way of doing things.

How will you use Big Data?