The literary critic Harold Bloom once said the measure of a work’s immortality is whether it bears re-reading. If we believe that, then generations to come will be puzzling over Adam Rifkin’s “Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications.”
Granted, one reason I had to read it three times is because I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about. But re-read I did and not skip off to some other pursuit. That bears some relation to Rifkin’s point about Google’s difficulty with social apps, like Buzz. Historically, Google is about delivering information in an efficient manner so you can go do something else with. It makes you efficient the way a panda is efficient: eat-poop-eat-poop… for 16 hours a day. In contrast, social media platforms are all about sucking up your time.Facebook doesn’t help you eat. Or poop. It only helps you use Facebook. Or Farmville.
After researching what pandas do all day, I was struck by how panda-like we are when we use the Internet.
Roaming a massive world wide web of forests, most of our time is spent searching for delicious bamboo and consuming it. 40 times a day we’ll poop something out — an email, a text message, a status update, maybe even a blog post — and then go back to searching-and-consuming.
