Why Google Wants to Be Like AvayaWhy Google Wants to Be Like Avaya

When Web giants start applying algorithmic filters to the content they serve you, they take on the feel of forward-looking enterprise vendors that layer context with communications.

Don't look now, but a subset of "consumerization" has entered a phase that's making some of the companies driving this trend look a lot like enterprise communications vendors in some interesting ways.

Apparently the phrase that pays, for the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google, is "algorithmic filters." Algorithmic filters are why you look at your Facebook feed these days and you have no idea who any of these people are or how they got into your Facebook feed. They're not even the "Friends" you never really knew that well but accepted as Friends because Facebook. Instead, they're people and paid sponsors that the Facebook algorithm decided you should see in your feed.

It seems like everybody hates Facebook's algorithmic filters, so naturally Twitter seems about to impose similar functionality on your Twitter feed. And Google, which has already imposed its search-centric view of the world on Gmail, may be headed in the same direction, according to Computerworld's Mike Elgan, who argues that Google's ultimate goal is to kill Gmail. And the reason why Google wants to kill Gmail, he says, is the same reason for those algorithmic filter-based changes in Facebook and Twitter: mediation.

Elgan argues that offering plain-vanilla email, or even email that can be organized and enhanced with the best search algorithms on the planet, is not a business Google wants to be in. What Google wants, he argues, is to position itself to better mediate between the user and the torrent of information and communications coming at the user. To be, in other words, a filter.

So here's how these Web giants start to look like enterprise communications vendors. The folks in our world--at least the forward-thinking ones--are moving towards a world where they, too, strive to be mediation filters. Only we've been calling it "context" in our world. It's the idea that your communications should be delivered to you, in real- or non-real-time, with as rich a set of relevant associated content and historical data as possible. In other words, giving it context.

That's always been their job. When they built attendant consoles, the context information came from a secretary who asked what the caller wanted, put him on hold, and then told the boss, "Mr. Knight on line 1, calling about the Michels contract." Well-implemented filters, originally human and now algorithmic, have clear business value that enterprises will pay to implement. (Whether a given vendor's productization of context fits the bill or not may be another matter.)

Consumers, by contrast, tend to resent someone else screening their content for them. And yet, Twitter may be determined to do this thing that its users don't want it to do. Why? Because it's got to make money off its position as an intermediary. Just selling ads and promoted tweets, apparently, isn't enough.

Consumers have no real recourse, since they're not paying Twitter anything for the service. Enterprises do have recourse, and smart vendors listen when customers tell them what they want when it comes to mediation features and functions. It's a good business to be in, and it always has been. It appears some of the Web giants have noticed.

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