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In as fast a moving tech-landscape as we're in - the internet is experiencing a content overload
Here are the facts. There are an average of 550 new social media users each minute. Twitter produces 474,000 tweets per minute. YouTube has 400 hours of video content uploaded every minute. There are 67,305,600 Instagram posts per day. It seems that every time we blink, we're overwhelmed with a tsunami of notifications. The advent of generative AI is only going to make this worse
At Frontdoor, we've embarked on a quest to epic journey to sort the signal from the noise in all corners of the web. We're building a personal librarian for the internet 👉
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As this is the first edition - we're going to self-indulge a little and dive into the state of the internet today and explore what the future of discover, connection and curation looks like.
Lets get into it...
What's the state of the internet today? 🌐
Andrew Chen, GP at a16z, recently wrote, “We’re living in a pivotal time in the history of mass communication — what we believe is the golden age of new media.”
With more content comes more choice than we've ever had. But this choice overload overwhelms most users. Unlike the early days of the internet, the question is no longer 'how do I find an answer to my question' but 'how do I find the best answer'.
Here are the facts. There are an average of 550 new social media users each minute. The Facebook-like button has been pressed 13 trillion times. Twitter produces 474,000 tweets per minute. YouTube has 400 hours of video content uploaded every minute. There are 67,305,600 Instagram posts per day. It seems that every time we blink there’s a new podcast published, or blog post to read, or book recommendation to order on Amazon. The advent of generative AI is only going to make this worse.
Furthermore, the rise of new forms of content online only serves to increase this overload; as the co-founder of NFT marketplace OpenSea recently noted, the number of NFTs on the platform has already surpassed the number of websites on the internet in 2010. Crucially, there’s clearly an appetite to access all this information. There are 3.5 billion Google searches every minute.
Is curation the answer? 📚
One reason it might be can draw support from the theory of psychology. Gaby Goldberg recently broke it down in a thought piece here.
Curation is a logical solution to the following three laws: Zuckerberg’s Law (which states users’ willingness to post on social media platforms increases exponentially over time), Dunbar’s Law (which states that there is an upper bound on the amount of connections or brain can handle) and Zipf’s Law (which states that the amount of value in any system of resources there are a small number of items of high value and a “long tail” of many more of low value.
The second category of support comes from early evidence of consumers’ willingness to pay for curation services. There’s been a dramatic rise in ‘curation newsletters’ such as the Every Bundle, Lenny’s Newsletter, The Browser, The Generalist etc. which all charge between 5 and 30 dollars a month to sift through and distil information in specific categories of knowledge.
What's wrong with search engines like Google? 🔦
Traditional search engines are great at answering questions with a defined answer most of the time. But they often fall flat when trying to answer open-ended questions where you might not know the right answer till you see it.
If this sounds familiar, you're not alone in thinking about this...
To build the next big search engine simply focus on people.
It’s why people add “reddit” to their queries and prefer to search social — we want to see results from humans, not soulless SEO farms.
— Amjad Masad ⠕ (@amasad)
Aug 8, 2022
A recent small medical issue has highlighted how much someone needs to disrupt Google Search. Google is no longer producing high quality search results in a significant number of important categories.
— Michael Seibel (@mwseibel)
Jan 2, 2022
What's discovery all about? 🪄
This interview with the founder of Pinterest offers a treasure trove of great advice for early stage founders but it captures the essence of what Discovery is and how it differs from search:
"Discovery, which is different from search, is a very human process. We’re not building a machine that answers questions, although that’s great. We’re helping you discover the things you like. And part of that is you literally going through the process of discovering them. Yes this, not this, yes this, not this."
It's a human process - and we think it goes well beyond dining room tables or wedding decor...
@Austen One way to avoid the limitations of a fixed AI is to use incentives and mechanism design, so you incorporate a large amount of motivated human intelligence (including eventually a satellite industry of third party AIs) into generating the outputs.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin)
Oct 24, 2020
What's Frontdoor building? 🛠
We're building a personal librarian for the internet. As Alexandra Sukin, Bessemer Ventures, put it - the end goal for curation is to reduce the friction to search and reduce the self-education required to navigate the internet.
More to be announced soon, but if you're keen on seeing what it can do - you can sign up for early access here 👇