Predicting Ecommerces Future Soon

Finding Asimov's Dream

Risking exposing the inner-nerd, I loved to read Isaac Asimov in my long misplaced youth. The Foundation Series was fascinating. The three laws of robotics and psychohistory were Plato, Nietzsche and Heidegger wrapped into a more lively narrative.  Psychohistory believed the future was knowable as long as a few rules were followed:

• The result set was sufficiently large (Asimov created the Galactic empire after reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)
• Those whose future could be known at a macro level couldn’t know their future at a micro level
• That humans are the only sentient beings in the universe

Content Networks, Labyrinths and Predicting The Future

Statistics are more than God playing with dice. Statistics, writ large enough on walls without shadow, can predict any website’s tiny future. None of us are as unique as we think. Walk around inside the living labyrinth that is Google Analytics long enough and you feel Asimov’s tap, tap, tap.

Turning we see those grey mutton chops that so defined Asimov. “So you think you are ready,” he asks simply. Yes, Isaac we are about to predict a tiny future. Inside the limited labyrinth we create between navigational taxonomy and site heuristics time is tiny, mathematical and soon to be predicted well enough to be "known".

The web is our Galactic Empire with a mathematical fractal slouching toward an infinity on every website. Doubt the truth of such an Alice In Wonderland assertion? Amazon is reaching toward a billion pages inside Google. Since Google never captures every page, Amazon may already have a billion pages of content online, a Galactic Empire of content. Amazon defines the three laws of Infinite Inventory  :

• In a Long Tail world dominated by wisdom of crowds the cheapest idea is to add more digital inventory, always add, add more and more faster and faster and better and better 
• Digital inventory of sufficiently large size creates enough predictable patterns tiny futures, futures of 2 to 20 minutes, can be predicted, tightened and tuned
• In an infinite inventory world finite patterns emerge via segments and personas those patterns are not infinite and so are predictable

Three things are about to conspire to make Asimov’s dream of psychohistory come true for tiny segments of time on the largest Sargasso Sea man has ever created – the worldwide web:

• Social/Search brought to you by a Google nearby
• The Statistics of Inbound marketing 
• Near Real Time

Google's Float, Nudge and Push

When Google floated their index absolutes died. Sartre killed God and Google killed uncertainty. Your site's positioning in the world became knowable only and ever via metrics. It was as if Google understood the world needed a push to move toward a marketing crystal ball. Many companies would have missed the signals, but Google is a company of, for and about signals. Hearing Zuckerberg discus Facebook as “infrastructure” woke some Googlers up. The slumbering superhero that is Google woke up, took a shower and got ready to rock.

Once a superhero is awake its clobbering time. Time is being clobbered into tiny fractals. Watching the stats of the multimillion dollar ecommerce site I managed back in the day finding the long tail fractal no matter how tiny we cut the data. The only sure thing in life is death, taxes, Black Swans and the Pareto distribution, the 80/20 rule, the long tail. Inside those fractals is history's three card Monte.

We follow the red queen into a vanishing moment of time that expands to a secret tiny black hole where every action is knowable, equations are written on walls without shadows and for tiny moments of what used to be called “time” the future is known.