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Google Social Search Adds Your Friends to Your Search Results

By Scott Gilbertson October 27th, 2009 Categories: Software & Tools, social

Google has added a new social-search tool to its experimental search options.

Google Social Search, which went live Monday afternoon, finds results from your social network, pulls a list of your contacts from sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa, Blogger, Google Reader and other social networks, as well as your Gmail contacts, to find results for search terms from people you know.

Facebook’s friend data isn’t shared publicly, so results from your Facebook friends won’t show up unless you’re also friends on other networks.

To enable the new experiment, head over to the Google Experimental Search page and add the new Social Search option. As with other experiments, you’ll need to be logged in to Google to see the social results.

Once the experiment is enabled, you’ll be able to search for something like “potato chips” with enhanced results. Along with the regular Google results showing top hits for the entire web, you’ll see a link to a write-up about potato chips from your friend’s food blog, as well. You might also see a friend’s tweet about potato chips, or a link to a Yelp review written by somebody you know where they talked about how good the potato chips are at the Lulu Petite sandwich shop.

While Google’s intro video (embedded below) shows search results from the social tool inline with other results (under the heading “Results from people in your social circle…”) that didn’t happen in our testing. To see the personalized results from our social graph we had to click the “Options” button and then filter the results by “social.”

As for the results, well, Social Search leaves a little to be desired, but the results depend heavily on how large your social circle is and how closely your interests match your friends. For example, a search for “Webmonkey” turned up a number of hits, since the past and present Webmonkey staff members are part of our social graph. However, two of us have been passing around a link to a (NSFW) McSweeney’s article about decorative gourds Tuesday morning, but a social search for “decorative gourds” returned nothing from our social graph. We seem to be alone on that one.

It’s important to note that Google Social Search is not a real-time search engine. The quality of results may suffer a little if you’re searching for things that your friends have only started posting about very recently.

The quality of results will also depend on how many services you’ve added to your Google Profile — the more social sites Google knows you hang out on, the more friends it has to draw on, and thus the more results you’ll see.

The exclusion of Facebook may seem like an egregious oversight, but it comes amidst a very public battle between Google and Facebook to become your hub on the social web. The recent push behind Google Profiles was the search company’s first major attempt to create a central place for you to store information about yourself and link to your profiles on other social networks. But Facebook is still the more popular place to build a profile, and Facebook struck a deal with Microsoft last week to let the Bing search engine index user activity on the site — a deal Google was left out of.

Compared to using the search features on social sites themselves, like Twitter and FriendFeed, Google’s Social Search comes in a distant second. But it does offer the advantage of finding everything in one place. It also acts as a very welcome filter. Try searching for “Where the Wild Things Are” on Twitter, and you’ll see thousands of tweets from people commenting about the movie or the book. Run the same search in Google Social Search, and you’ll just see what your friends — and the people they chat with publicly — are saying.

All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is already available publicly on the web — with a bit of Google hacking you could find it yourself. But what’s social about that?

To see Social Search in action, check out this video from Google:


To enable Social Search, make sure you’re logged in to your Google account and head over to the Experimental Search page.

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New Facebook Features Show It’s Still Finding Its Real-Time Legs

By Michael Calore October 26th, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, social

Facebook has made two major changes to the way it displays real-time data about user activity on its platform — one for publishers to help track the spread viral content, and one change that affects how people see updates from their friends.

The site has enhanced its Share feature — the tiny “Share this on Facebook” widgets seen at the bottom of blog posts, videos and photos — to include live stats tracking. Starting Monday, publishers can see a live count of how many times a particular post or piece of media has been shared on Facebook.

The new live stats counter for Facebook Share closely mimics Tweetmeme’s popular “Retweet” badges, or the live widgets that show the number of Diggs or up-votes on Reddit a piece of content has accumulated.

Facebook Share is getting some analytics tools, too. In addition to learning how many times Facebook users have shared a post, publishers can also see whenever somebody “likes” the shared post, leaves a comment, or clicks back to the original site from within Facebook.

It’s not the only tweak to Facebook’s real-time data flow the company has made to its site within the last few days.

On Friday, the Facebook home page for logged-in users was redesigned to show a filtered stream of updates. Rather than just showing a stream of every status update, every post and every “like” from within their network, Facebook users can now choose between a streamlined, filtered view and a raw, unfiltered view.

This change basically incorporates the old “Highlights” feed — the most important posts from your friends — into the main News Feed. The result is a stream of the most interesting or important stuff that’s been posted within the past couple of days.

click for largerThe new filtered News Feed is now the default. The more times a post is commented on or liked, the more “popular” it becomes. An algorithm determines what goes into the feed and what stays hidden. The old “Highlights” box is being removed, as it’s now redundant.

The Live Feed, which can be accessed by clicking on the new “Live Feed” tab at the top of the home page, gives a more immediate, Twitter-like stream. It displays all of the recent activity, posts and updates from you and your friends, regardless of popularity.

The odd thing here is that one of these changes brings Facebook up to speed with its competitors in the real-time content sharing game, while the other change sets it back.

Publishers want to know how their content is doing out in the wild, so the new Share tools make sense.

But in altering the News Feed in the way it has, Facebook actually becomes less of a real-time news source for its users. By adding popularity filters, important stuff might not bubble up into your News Feed for hours or days. I just looked at my News Feed, and the newest item is four hours old. If I really want to know what my friends are doing, reading, liking and talking about right now, I have to switch over to the Live Feed. Luckily, this is as easy as one mouse click.

But what does this say about the proliferation of real-time data streams on the web? Publishers always want better real-time data, but do users? Are regular people by and large tired of the massive firehose of updates their favorite sites now all offer? Is it all becoming just too much?

If so, Facebook made the right move with the News Feed changes. If not, hey, there’s always the Live Feed option one click away. Or there’s Twitter. And if you want a real-time stream you can filter even more minutely, you can turn to FriendFeed or Cliqset or Plaxo Pulse.

If the changes to Facebook’s stream bothers you — and judging from the comments of my own Facebook friends, the changes aren’t being seen as that friendly — they are easy to alter. Facebook Insider has an excellent post showing how to change your feed settings. Additional tips are in the comments.

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Flickr Adds People-Tagging for Finding Friends in Photos

By Michael Calore October 21st, 2009 Categories: Multimedia, social

Popular photo sharing service Flickr added a new feature Wednesday that lets users tag each other in photos. In addition, Flickr has updated its privacy controls, so users can opt out of being personally identified in individual photos.

The new feature lets you tag particular people in pictures by drawing bounding boxes around their faces. Flickr then asks you to ID each person, and if the person is a Flickr member, the system suggests the member’s name to you as you type the tag.

Once people are tagged, it makes finding them in searches much easier. Instead of searching for somebody’s name and only seeing photos blindly tagged with your search term, Flickr now shows you where that person is located inside the photo — especially helpful if you’re looking at a group shot.

Flickr has over 40 million members according to Yahoo, which owns the service.

People-tagging features have long been available to users of other photo-sharing web services like Facebook and Google’s Picasa. And Flickr’s new feature doesn’t go as far as Picasa, which will actually find the person’s face in the picture and take a guess at who it is. Google debuted this technology in 2008 and enhanced its capabilities just last month.

But while Flickr’s new people tags are close to what you’ll find elsewhere, Flickr’s implementation offers more user controls for privacy by letting you opt out of being ID’d.

As Facebook users know, you often get tagged in a photo that you didn’t approve of, isn’t particular flattering or shows you in a, shall we say, “compromising position.” But once you’re tagged in a picture on Facebook, that photo with you in it gets tied to your profile. It shows up in image searches, whether you want it to appear or not.

Flickr’s new face-tagging system lets users opt out of being tagged in individual photos. So, you can pretend that’s not really you holding that bong or shotgunning that can of PBR. You can also set your preferences so you can never be tagged in a photo, or you can determine which users are allowed to tag you and which users aren’t. You can also opt out of the whole face-tagging system in general.

Non-Flickr members can be identified in photos as well, but they’ll need to approve the ID before it appears within the system.

That won’t stop users from adding your name as a tag on the photo. Users can also draw a box around your face and add your name as a note. But neither of those options physically connect the tag to your Flickr account the way the people-tagging feature does. Instead, it’s just another piece of metadata attached to the photo.

For those who want to play along, just watch your Recent Activity page. Every time you’re tagged in a picture, you’ll see a little notifier in your Recent Activity stream telling you who tagged you, and offering a link to the picture.

Once a photo is tagged up with people, the photo page displays a list of all the people identified within the picture, along with links to their Flickr profiles.

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Geocities, Identity and the Problem With Disappearing Web Services

By Scott Gilbertson October 8th, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Web Basics, social

Yahoo is shutting down its free web hosting site Geocities later this month. The company recently sent out a final notice to Geocities users telling them the service will shutdown October 26 and offering to port their data to Yahoo’s site hosting service. Yahoo charges $5 per month for its simple hosting plan.

While we have a bit nostalgia for the days of free Geocities accounts, let’s face it, most of that content is pretty outdated and often downright ugly. Most of us aren’t worried about Geocities disappearing. But there’s a larger issue we should be worried about — yet another once-popular service is disappearing from the web. What’s going to happen in ten years when the Googlehoo of 2020 decides to close down its aging Facebook website?

Even if the web services we use and rely on today offer a way to export our data when they disappear in the future, there’s a whole other component to those sites that’s currently nearly impossible to export — the relationships we’ve formed with other users.

It’s precisely those relationships that have led some to suggest, as Chris Messina does in a recent talk at the MindTrek conference, that identity is the real web platform — that the real value of social websites is not necessarily the data (though that can be important too), but connections between people.

Sadly, when sites disappear, whether they’re artifacts like Geocities or more modern examples like Pownce or Ma.gnolia, there’s never a way to recover the lost connections between people. Even when services return, as Pownce recently did, they don’t bring back the human connections.

The problem, as Messina points out in the video of his talk (embedded below) is that rather than focus on identity, most of today’s web services focus on the platform — whether it’s sharing photos on Flickr or broadcasting messages on Twitter.

That means not only is the majority of the service’s development effort expended toward improving the platform, the majority of export options are also geared toward the platform — export your photos or back up your blog posts. Very few sites concern themselves with backing up your friends and relationships.

But if the central focus of the web was identity, rather than specific platforms, we might see a far different set of strategies emerge. As WordPress developer Lloyd Budd writes on his blog, “If you really love your customers, the exported data (you offer) will be richer than the raw material they originally entered.” In other words, there would be a way to take not only your data, but your metadata as well.

Making identity into the platform is something OpenID is supposed to help do. However, thus far, it has largely failed to deliver anything of the sort. As Messina points out in the video, OpenID is improving, but it still has a long way to go.

In the mean, we’ll watch Geocities and other services disappear without being able to give back half of what their users gave to them.

Identity is the Platform from Chris Messina on Vimeo.

Photo by Sage/Flickr, CC

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Tr.im URL Shortening Service Closes its Doors

By Scott Gilbertson August 10th, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Software & Tools, social

The popular URL shortening service Tr.im has announced it is shutting down. That means, just as critics of URL shortening services predicted, a whole lot of shortened links are about to disappear in a black hole.

Or maybe not. The developers of Tr.im say that the service will remain running through the end of the year, so your old links will “continue to redirect until at least December 31, 2009.” The post goes on to say, that Tr.im “will not be turning tr.im off for redirections” and the homepage claims that “your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.”

The wording is bit vague, but the way we’re reading it is that while the Tr.im shortening service is dead as of now, the redirections will continue working until the end of the year. At midnight on December 31 all your Tr.im URLs will turn into pumpkins and vanish into the ether. Or perhaps the developers of Tr.im plan to leave the redirect engine going indefinitely, though that seems highly unlikely.

Either way, Tr.im’s saga is pretty much a textbook case of why URL shorteners are a bad idea all around.

The most obvious problem is that shortened URLs could lead anywhere -��� a spam site, a phishing site, a porn site, a malware site, who knows?

Of course this isn’t a new problem. Twitter may be responsible for thrusting URL shorteners back into the mainstream, but the idea began as a way to fix the shortcomings of some e-mail clients (like Outlook), which often wrapped long lines, making links impossible to click on. However, URL shorteners quickly fell out of popularity — the proliferation of spam and link hijacking made most of us reluctant to click on something that could lead, well, anywhere — until Twitter made them favorable again.

Then there’s the problem of long-term viability of your links. As is being illustrated now with Tr.im’s demise, a shorterner adds a second possible point of failure, making shortened links even more vulnerable to “link rot” than standard web links.

Perhaps the cost won’t be that high in the end, Twitter is after all not really an archival service. That is, most people don’t dig too deep into their own, or other users, archives so perhaps all those links will die and no one will even notice. In the meantime, most users will migrate to more popular, feature-rich and long-standing services like Bit.ly, the most popular, and TinyURL, currently number two.

Still, if nothing else, Tr.im serves as cautionary tale for anyone interested in creating archival short URLs — do it yourself. There are several options for sites to run their own URL-shortening services, including the excellent Awe.sm.

[Also worth noting, it appears that Nambu, one of our favorite native OS X Twitter clients, will be shutdown as well, though its final fate appears to still be up in the air]

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Facebook Offers Vanity URLs for User Profiles and Pages

By Michael Calore June 9th, 2009 Categories: social


Starting this weekend, Facebook is letting each user pick a real name to identify the URL of their profile.

Right now, your Facebook profile’s URL ends in a decidedly inhuman string of numbers. Not so easy for anyone to remember (except search engines). Starting Friday night, the social networking site will allow users to pick out a profile URL that contains their real name. This will make URLs on the site much cleaner, easier to remember and (hooray) more appropriate to put on a business card.

Starting at 12:01am Saturday June 13 [that’s 12:01am EDT, Friday 9pm Pacific], you’ll be able to go to Facebook and claim your name on a first-come, first-served basis. If you have a fairly common name and your full name is already taken, you’ll be given the option of choosing an alternate permutation, like first initial and last name, or the addition of your middle initial. User names have to be at least five characters long, and they can only contain letters, numbers or periods.

Also — and this is important — once you pick a user name, you won’t be able to change it or transfer it.

The switch is not mandatory. Users will be able to assign real names to their profiles as well as any Facebook Pages they administer, but only if that Page has more than 1,000 fans. Groups and Events won’t get human-friendly URLs at this time. Facebook has a full rundown of the eligibility requirements on its site.

Facebook’s move towards so-called vanity URLs for user profiles echoes a similar change Google made to its own user profiles earlier this year. The trend towards offering real names in URLs is part of a wider movement among social websites, as users want to make it easier for their friends to find them, either by simple logic or through search engines.

And that’s the “big deal” part — by getting a Facebook URL with your real name in it, you’ll be much easier to find on Google. You’ll also have a single public page where you can link off to all of your other social profiles.

This is something we’ve already been able to do using lifestreaming sites or social aggregation sites like Plaxo Pulse or FriendFeed, but with limited success.

Check out the contact info listed on my personal blog — I point to my FriendFeed page as the place to go if you want to find me on all the social networks I belong to. However, when I search for my name in Google, I see that my Facebook profile pops up on the first page of results. My FriendFeed profile doesn’t show up until you go deeper. Obviously, Facebook has far more Google juice than FriendFeed, and its pages get ranked higher in the results because they have more authority.

So, this is a win for the SEO of your personal brand, whether it be your name, your business, or a nickname you’ve had your whole life. You’re simply going to be that much easier to find on the web.


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