The buzz on Jeff Jarvis

When was Jeff Jarvis not a multi-hypenate? Once the television critic for TV Guide and People, he was later founding editor of Entertainment Weekly, the Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News, a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner and the president-creative director for Advance Internet.

But Jarvis' current incarnation fits him best: When not teaching in CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism, the New Yorker oversees Buzzmachine.com, one of the most widely followed blogs on new media. His influence is such that when he chronicled his experiences with Dell Computers' terrible customer service, he ignited a consumer revolt. "What Would Google Do?," Jarvis' first book, analyzes the search engine's genius to show how social networking is changing business forever, and how it represents a blueprint for the successful companies of tomorrow. Before his Barnes & Noble speaking engagement, we took a few minutes to speak with one of the media world's most powerful critics (and yes, we will be Twittering this).

Social networks like Facebook are feeling intense pressure to become profitable. If you were Facebook, what would Google do?
I think Google would find the way to get the maximum value out of what's there. For example, there's knowledge and data there. That has intrinsic value. It has market value where you can sell data. You can say, ‘Hey, here's what we know about the performance of those crazy kids that you can't figure out.' Facebook has value that makes you more efficient. It's like: Is Amazon really a bookstore or a knowledge company? I think it's the latter.

In your book, you actually say Amazon is more Consumer Reports than Consumer Reports. Can you really say that about Facebook?
You can say that about Facebook if you're talking about information about aggregate behavior. When you can say that the page for someone like Sully Sullenberger just exploded, that really tells you something about the country and about knowledge and how they come together.

Then you still have to monetize it.
Well, the other thing Google would do with Facebook is get much better in advertising, because you do know so much about the people and can target them. What [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg tried to do with Facebook's advertising system, Beacon, was brilliant, but it was announced badly. I think of it this way: Your product is your ad and your customer is your ad agency. So, if your customers are talking about your product and saying good things about it, that's ideal. And that, in essence, is what Beacon was trying to capture. It was trying to say, ‘Linda just went out and bought that camera, and you trust Linda's taste, and you know Linda knows her cameras.' So you say to yourself, ‘Hmmm, that matters to me.'

Now, Linda has to want you to know she just bought that camera. The issue for me is never privacy, which is where the controversy over Beacon came from. The issue is control of data.

That's why Twitter is so smart. You have to want to say ‘I'm buying a shoe.'
And there's value in that. Some guys recently did a Twitter thing with my book-they said if you re-tweet their message and follow them, they are giving away a copy of the book. Suddenly 1,600 people went to my book page. I think the thing to remember about social networks-and this also would include Google-is they start by growing to critical mass, to figure out what they are, and then they get revenue in. In the current crunch to get capital, of course, it's hard to do that.

You extol the virtues of free-flowing information. But don't you think Twitter can also generate a certain amount of groupthink?
I think the crowd is wise, and when you can extract their wisdom, that's a good thing. I think that page ranking at Google recognizes that when people coalesce around a word, around a resource, it has value. And the Internet is a magnificent vehicle for individual expression. That said, my 16-year-old son Jake recently complained that the problem with Twitter is all people Twitter about is Twitter. But that'll change in time.