Google gets big company disease?
from Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger by Robert Scoble The two guys who started Dodgeball leave in a hissy fit. Google bought Dodgeball in mid-2005. Dodgeball was the pre-cursor to Twitter and Jaiku (albeit a bit more focused on just cell phones than either of those newer services are). Last summer it was the rage with many of the San Francisco cool kids, er, influencers. I remember Irina and Eddie using it almost non stop on our trip to Montana. So, why didn’t Google get it enough to give these two more resources? Easy. Same reason I couldn’t convince Microsoft to buy Flickr before Yahoo did. It’s a small thing. A stupid thing. A lame thing. Big companies have trouble grokking small things like Dodgeball. Heck, how many of you have called Twitter “really lame” in the past two months? Tons! More evidence that Google is having difficulty getting small things? I heard a rumor that Google executive Marissa Mayer almost killed the Google Reader team because she didn’t think it would get popular. Feed readers are still “small things.” Seeing business value in them is difficult. It seems that management is trying to get a handle on the chaos that is Google but in doing so is removing some of what made Google attractive to entrepreneurial developers. What are you hearing from your Google friends?
This has some really obvious applications in social media. Digg is the premier example: its “network of friends” system inevitably results in users Digging what their friends Digg, often blindly. So while quality stories still have a marginally better chance of rising to the top, this “follow the leader” effect means that users are more likely to amplify the decisions of other users than go against them, even if the stories being Dugg aren’t very good. Digg could prevent that by removing Digg counts and friend networks entirely, but that would counteract its own aims: growing as quickly as possible so it can report huge user numbers. To paraphrase the 
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