Is Google a Death Knol for Squidoo?
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As many of you have probably heard, yesterday Google announced the launch of it’s knol community. (Coverage from Mashable) Often accused as being a ‘Wikipedia‘ killer, Knol is designed to be a ‘moderated place for experts to share their knowledge’… hrmmmm… That sounds remarkably like a certain other site I use (not to name names but it starts with an S and ends in quidoo)
The ‘expert’ content creation space is definitely hitting the big time with google entering the market, but does Squidoo need to be worried besides watching what Google does? I don’t think so and here’s why:
Marketers vs. Academics -
As I browsed around the Knol site to get a feel for it, I came away with a very dry and almost sterile impression. I think Google’s definition of ‘expert’ is going to vary signficantly from Squidoo’s. By expert, I think Google is hoping to see academics and scientists writing position papers, similar to a peer review. This makes sense as Google is founded and run by very smart academic minded people so clearly the site is going to reflect those influences.
Conversely, Squidoo follows the mantra that everyone is an expert and everyone deserves a shot to talk about themselves, their business, their ideas and their opinions. While this can lead to a slightly less serious tone than what knol appears to be targeting, I think the result is that Squidoo is much less intimidating to build a page on.
Marketers 1, Academics 0
The Media Experience -
Squidoo allows you to add all kinds of feeds, videos, products, examples, data, charts, and other rich multimedia to help prove your case.
Knol doesn’t.
Community -
While many people are avid users of Google’s search engine as well as their Gmail platform, Google is still going to have to create a core group of die-hard early adopters to make the site work. This is harder to do than it looks but Google has done it in the past. If Google can in fact get a community together, their ability to scale may create a monster.
Right now, the money’s probably not good enough (Adsense only) for authors to leave Wikipedia or Squidoo for it (Yes, even though Wikipedia is free it still has massive mindshare and offers some power to its power users).
Customer Service -
It will be interesting to see if Google can provide the levels of service that the 6 people at Squidoo and the 15? or so at Wikipedia can with their gigantic workforce of thousands.. I doubt they can.
Inertia -
Google Knol still has to get through the Dip in order to really come out as a major player in this space. The more users that other ‘expert’ sites pick up, the harder this will be.
Summary -
Squidoo isn’t going anywhere. I do see Knol eventually filling a niche as something of an online peer review forum for academics and scientists which I think is actually sorely needed in that area. If Google really wanted to challenge Wikipedia and/or Squidoo for direct users, they would have allowed you to add a ton more media, integrated their social networks, and generally thrown a lot more resources at it.
What do you think? Fired Calamari or Squid Supreme?
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Comments
I think this is due to the rap Wikipedia takes for sometimes biased content and self-interested moderators. An approved list of academics might create an authority site with prestige similar to what encyclopedias once enjoyed.
That would be handy for research, but much less fun than Squidoo for surfing.
In the Google blog entry the conclude with “Everyone knows something. See what people are writing about, then tell the world what you know.” Does indeed sound like another site we know. Remember, Knol is still in beta. I’m sure they’ll be adding more features.
I’m trying to figure out how to write a knol about the Squidoo City Guide to let our members collaborate, without violating TOS.
One word: Orkut…What the hell does that mean? and now, because Google got a bigger war chest…they are training their sights on Squidoo?
Seth Godin better be ready…This going to be an interesting “battle” of eyeballs…
If there is one thing good about competition…It makes the Web easier to use for Noobs like me…;)
I forsee it being the part of Google that has been missing for nearly ten years. A person used to be able to surf for white papers and interesting scientific results, 5 or 6 years ago if you searched for that you got 2000 pages of porn results. Google has changed. This might reopen the avenues they lost.
I’m not happy though because it points to the conspirancy concept of web unification. If web unification happens, we’ll be paying a cable-like bill for Ebay, Google, and which ever news affiliate gets high bid. Everything else will be added into “premium service packages” and any one who doesn’t have millions of dollars to cram up the corporate egos, their tiny places of honor will be a faint scratch on the .com chalk board.
It will be interesting to see what Google has in store for Knol, especially since they are going after Digg and have taken over Youtube. I can see an integration of all their services in the near future in they attempts to be a One Stop Shop on the net.
It also falls in line with my assumption that Google is modeling itself after a Broadcast Network Business model to attract the lions share of commercial advertisement for the Core demographics that advertisers seek.