This comes from an internal Google memo, from Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP of Product Management, that was later released publicly.  Its tone is thoroughly optimistic but more importantly it lays out some of Google’s theses on the future of the web.   Particularly interesting is the piece on content creation, which stresses the importance of experts to craft our data, a very under-represented view point in new product development.

Systems that facilitate high-quality content creation and editing are crucial for the Internet’s continued growth, because without them we will all sink in a cesspool of drivel. We need to make it easier for the experts, journalists, and editors that we actually trust to publish their work under an authorship model that is authenticated and extensible, and then to monetize in a meaningful way.

He also communicates a bias for making all information available, dismissing the common model that charges for access to interesting data.

All of our products should reflect our bias toward giving our customers, users, and partners as much data as possible – and letting them do with it what they wish.

This makes sense if you’re Google, where the scale of information only compounds value to your core search product. I still think the ‘old’ model of packaging and selling access to such data has some legs left, especially if you’re a small  company focused on extracting intention-based data from a valuable niche.

You can segment the data into two types: noun-based data and intention-based data.  Noun-based data is mostly descriptive of the world around us – specs of a phone, who our friends on facebook are, etc.  This data, without a question, should be made freely available for all to use.  On the other side is intention-based data.  If you run a poll that asks a user to rank which aspects of a phone are most important to guiding their purchasing decision, you’re taping into intention-based data, the same type of data that google makes all of their money off of.

Intention-based data is a bit harder to set free, partly for reasons of privacy, but also because it’s intrinsically valuable.  You need to work hard to create value around noun-based data, that’s why it makes sense to set it free.  The richness of functionality that the Twitter and Facebook API’s created could not be possible if either company hoarded their data.  Intention-based data is different, it has implicit information leverage.  As soon as you set it free, you remove the leverage that creates the value to begin with.  You want to be the conduit of this data.