Information Wants to Be Shared

6

Future Sharing

There are two areas where a shared approach is already evolving beyond the information sharing examined earlier: content platforms and sharing creation. A full analysis of them is premature, but it is useful to describe them briefly as guideposts to developments that might still come.

 

The Rise of the Content Platform

Search was supposed to solve the problem of how people should allocate their scarce attention, allowing people to efficiently uncover the information they need. Google’s algorithms have been structured to consider the information available and provide a ranking based on “quality” or “usefulness.” Microsoft’s Bing actually envisions itself as a “decision engine” rather than a search engine. In each case, the ...