Google to Surfers: Let’s Get Small

This week’s “seriously?!?” moment, goes to the folks at Google who obviously spent some of their downtime listening to the classic Steve Martin stand-up skit, “Let’s Get Small.” That’s the only explanation I can find for this maneuver.

Google has purchased and will soon bring online g.co. Yes, g.co. In the near future, when you type g.co, you will be taken to a Google page. No one knows what page, but it will be a page in the Google family, so you know that you’ll be well taken care of.

Why? Because Google.com is too hard for people to remember. It has too many letters, not to mention that pesky “m” at the end. It’s going to be much easier for people to remember to type g.co (because unlearning to type an “m” after co is so simple) and then from there, they can navigate to where ever they really want to be.

Is this as dumb as it sounds, or am I missing something?

Google reminds us not to confuse g.co with goo.gl, which is their new URL shortener. In other words, goo.gl, will help you get small, while g.co is already small.

Now we must warn you to take care when getting small. As Steve Martin says, you should never get small while driving. He made that mistake, and here’s what happened:

I’m not sure that Google should be encouraging such reckless behavior, but they’re Google. Next week Facebook will roll out.co, and then we can all get small together.
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LinkedIn Launches Industry News Aggregator

There’s too much information out there and not enough time in the day, so why not let your industry peers help you sort through the clutter!

That’s the pitch for LinkedIn’s new social news aggregator LinkedIn Today.  Set up newspaper style, the program delivers “top” stories for the industries LinkedIn has associated with your professional profile. The stories are a mix of items shared by your network, your peers and “professionals” (ie, everyone else) and mostly they appear to be gleaned from Twitter.
At a glance, there appears to be a lot of options and levels of information that you can narrow down yourself with a variety of check boxes. However, a lot of what you’ll find here is just more noise and clutter. For example, some stories have a small blue banner with a number. Click this and you’ll see a list of people who shared this link on Twitter. You could use this list to find new people to follow on Twitter, so that’s helpful.

From there, you’re given a breakdown of these Twitterites by company, by industry and by location. By checking boxes, I can see how many “online media professionals” in the Los Angeles area shared the story about the LinkedIn Today launch. The answer is one but the question is, do you care? Are you more apt to be interested in people who Twitter from Los Angeles say than those from New York? The real purpose here seems to be giving B2B marketing pros an easy way of finding potential clients in their field or area. Not that that’s a bad thing, but let’s call a monkey a monkey, shall we?

My initial reaction to LinkedIn Today is that it’s creating more clutter, not less thanks to two big issues. First, the multiple boxes and columns don’t make for easy scanning. The best aggregators are straightforward lists with headlines and summaries that let you scan the contents in seconds.

Next, the sources are ridiculous. In the News and Noteworthy section I have an advertisement for CDBaby (I love them but it’s not news) and a link to what looks like a downloadable music bootleg. Very nice, LinkedIn, very professional.

Of course, that’s the main problem with pages that are curated by a computer, especially those that use popularity as a prime factor. I don’t think a graphic on how to beat the Watson Computer on Jeopardy is as interesting as the 143K people who shared the link through StumbleUpon.
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