Our experience of time, as we all know, is elastic. When you’re stuck in traffic and late for an appointment, every minute can seem like an eternity. When you’re sharing good wine and stimulating conversation with friends, on the other hand, hours can pass like minutes.
Time exhibits similar elasticity when it comes to putting information in context. When you’re a sales manager with the end of the quarter bearing down on you, you want to see all of the big proposals waiting for customer approval now. But if you don’t make your numbers for the quarter and want to figure out why, you’ll probably want to be able to review the histories of key deals as they progressed over time—so you can figure out how they may have gotten derailed.
It may be useful to think of these two approaches as “Facebook Time” and “Google Time.” When users are on Facebook, they typically focus only on whatever content is new and fresh. In fact, the whole site is designed around the chronological “newness” of content.
Google, in marked contrast, lends itself to finding all content relevant to a particular topic regardless of its age. So you can do historical research—as well as getting the most up-to-date content.
This is one of the reasons that the Facebook and Google models are likely to co-exist as the web evolves. The time-context of content that provides is relevant to a particular type of use. Users will therefore gravitate to one or the other based on their needs at the moment.
When it comes to Information Optimization (IO) within the enterprise, it is probably also worthwhile to think in terms of these two types of time-context. In some cases, the business objective will be to ensure that users are presented with the most up-to-date content related to a given topic. For example, if a manager is working on a compliance challenge, it is obviously important that he or she is looking at the most up-to-date revisions of all applicable regulatory mandates and corporate policies.
In other situations, a user may need to gather a combination of older and newer content. For example, a marketer trying to put the best possible “spin” on a price increase may need to find out how much and how often the price of a product has changed over the past few years.
A user may also need content that specifically dates from some particular moment in the past. E-discovery often requires this kind of date-specific retrieval—as does the evaluation of long-term business initiatives.
The bottom line is that designers of corporate IO strategies should not ignore time-context as they figure out how to meet the content retrieval needs of business users. Content isn’t just about keywords and topical relevance. It’s also about time.
content retrieval, context, Facebook, Google, Information Optimization, IO strategies, time-context
The Race is already on between Google & Facebook. But Google appears to be focusing on segmentation by organizing around “circles,” allowing an easy way to target particular posts to friends, family, colleagues, etc. In fact you can do this on Facebook as well, but Facebook lists are not as easy to find or edit; nor are they as easy to view as a separate stream.