In attending this SDForum SearchSIG event tuesday night, I was keen to learn what Wikia, FriendFeed, Mahalo, and Facebook were doing about social search. As it turns out - and as I pointed out during the Q&A to lively discussion (which I think was recorded but doesn’t seem to be posted yet) - the answer is nothing much.

My premise in making that comment was that social search be defined as a search deriving its results from “a statistically meaningful sample of people meaningfully related to me”. I gave as an example Zagat’s guide to NYC restaurants, which, back in the day, was exactly that - a usefully large group of, mostly, actual foodies.

Mahalo, imho, is simply an extension of the editorial approach into semi-pro range. Instead of one food editor of the NYTimes, you could have, I don’t know, 10?, editors of the NYC pages. Wikia, simply the cult of the amateur doing the same thing. In both cases, these are curated results pages. If the curators are competent, passionate, and/or otherwise motivated, this is great and a step forward from algorithmic results. But making better results pages ain’t social search.

Neither is telling me what my friends think. Sure twitter lazyweb is a great way to get a recommendation for an indian restaurant in Palo Alto, but it’s a lousy way to get one for a dentist in missoula. Especially if you don’t live there and have a bunch of friends there.

Even del.icio.us and other “social search 1.0″ tools are still, more or less, dumb boxes of votes. Those votes are by smart people and often people like me (hence why I find delicious popular interesting), but there’s no variability on a given query on the axis of “social”. And, like mahalo and wikia, the results are mostly url’s - i.e. links to other pages where you as often as not have to execute another search or dig through socially undifferentiated data to extract value (a link to a restaurant page on yelp, for example, with a bunch of reviews from people I don’t know or trust).

There are a bunch of tools that let you ask questions of people. LinkedIn does a great job of this, again within a specific community, but they are very clever in the way things can seep out beyond the first degree network without hitting the undifferentiated population of “everyone”. That said, it’s still an expansion of “me”, on the assumption that my business colleagues and their business colleagues are to some degree usefully alike. While somewhat true, this is not nearly as useful as a larger population of people “like me,” who might or might not be related to me socially.

Lijit is doing a similarly interesting and useful job of letting me search the corpus read by my network, and with a little help from MyBlogLog and del.icio.us, my network’s network. Lijit is awesome, and I often use it to search my own stuff.
But what I really would like to see from “social search” is something that can search my network/neighborhood AND search other neighborhoods like mine, where “like mine” is pivotable based on context (friends, business, geo, special need, etc.). Like last.fm for stuff other than music maybe.

(I’m barely commenting on Friendfeed and Facebook because, to date, those are seredipitous discovery tools more than search ones, and ultimately you’re mostly finding people, not useful data derived from groups of people.)

Is anyone doing anything interestingly like this?

On the few occasions I’ve had to hear Tim O’Reilly speak, I’ve never failed to come away inspired.

A couple of choice anecdotes and quotes from his opening keynote at Etech last night:

• “Hackers change the world while having fun”
• On Col. Kittinger, the guy who went up in a weather balloon, skydove out, hit the speed of sound without a vehicle, and was laying out of it on the ground — his friend ran up and gave him the finger to celebrate his statement: “There are always people who say it can’t be done. Just give ‘em the one-finger salute and keep on going.”
• Wrestle with the angels. Attack the hard problems.
• Things they are paying attention to at O’Reilly (and represented at the show):
• open-source hardware
• sensors and ambient computing / data mining open platforms and implicit web
• bionics / people hacking / brain hacking
• personal genomics
• collective intelligence (”Larry Lessig is the Matt Cutts of government.”)
• climate change
• Rilke’s “The Man Walking”

In talking to an entrepreneur considering several projects of various levels of commercial strength, he was reminded of the Cookie Monster winning a game show on Sesame Street. Behind Door #1: a million dollars in cash. Door #2, a castle and a yacht. Behind Door #3: a cookie. You know where Tim’s going. . as the audience starts chanting like the Cookie Monster. . .

“Choose the cookie!”

One of the fun things about the MyBlogLog reporting dashboard is how easy it is to monitor referring search terms, and how unexpected some of them are. Here are some that represent the range, as well as a few of the more interesting or amusing ones that have caught my eye over the past year. I’ve skipped the obvious ones (Yahoo, my name, etc.).
While many of them are not especially popular in terms of number of referrals, some are shockingly well ranked (including the last two, for which I rank #4 and #6 on Google, respectively).

• refurbished vw beetles
• gtd outlook
• craigslist mexico city
• mark cuban
• vw transmission fail (heh!)
• hyper local communities
• i hate good-byes. i know what i need. i need more hellos.
• point setting on ghia
• gambling vs. insurance
• “farecast” “revenue”
• underwear shoot 2007
• “the world is scary”
• prefab modernism
• widget trends
• linkedin “people you may know” (this is a popular one)
• “why i love new york”
• custom show tractor trailers
• belle and sebastian live at hollywood bowl
• visualizing data journalism
• fairmont sucks (heh!)
• loans that change lives
• is indeed.com illegal
• “my wife thinks you [sic]
• “install propane”
• car+ problem
• new york subway turnstyle
• mexico
• california+ redwoods
• bigfoot vs.
• joel spolsky scientologist
• guy kawasaki 10 rules
• “the wire” “politics”
• cookie+ puss
• writa [sic] a poem
• meaning greetings to the new brunette
• how to build valet stand
• youtube pie fight
• music insults
• decadent societies

I’m absorbing a panel at the excellent Defrag conference in Denver, and thanks to the best wifi I’ve ever actually had at a conference, combined with an audience of some of most socially wired people around, finding myself exercising a learning paradigm that I’ve often experienced but rarely been able to enjoy to this degree.

In the last two sessions, I’ve looked up the company websites and blogs of several speakers, subscribed to multiple RSS feeds from people I’ve met here, added several people to my social networks, posted a question to the room via twitter, joined a Facebook group (no you can’t join) on a thread of interest created at the conference, posted a clever comment on the wall there, and discovered and followed a twitter account set up to comment the conference. After posting this, I might even link to it there.

What’s interesting to me about this is that I don’t usually do orthogonal multi-tasking well — and I don’t usually take kindly to people opening up laptops in my meetings either. But this has had the opposite effect, enhancing my experience of listening and thinking about things that are being said, rather than distracting from it. I’ve stayed completely off of email and IM and outside distractions (despite having facebook and twitter tabs open).

So it’s sort of like an IRC backchannel - only I get to decide who’s in it and how I want to flavor the experience in terms of tools. Come to think of it, I haven’t used any of the three quasi-official collaboration tools offered through the conference organizers, which validates (for me) two key themes of this show so far — that open standards and identities are going to continue to enable users to drive increasingly customized and personal experiences around idea sharing and group collaboration, and that there’s plenty more to do in the group / enterprise collaboration space.

There’s probably something interesting that could be done to enable the exchange of identities - something like what Chris Pirillo does for Gnomedex with OPML, only less “all or none”.

Defrag, and the people attending it, are changing the way I listen. How do you listen?

Yesterday, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient and founder of Grameen Bank, spoke at Yahoo!. I was lucky enough to stake out a good seat, and was very glad I did.

There’s nothing quite like hearing from a guy who has taken hundreds of thousands of beggars out of poverty and millions of humans out of abusive, village-scale loan-sharking situations to remind you what “scalable social solutions” could really accomplish if we put some effort into it. Starting with a $27 loan to 42 women in one village, his bank has to date issued over $6.3B in loans to over 7.4 million borrowers — a veritable tidal wave of tiny payments that has changed government policies and built new infrastructure (e.g., the largest mobile phone company in the country).

In web2.0, we talk about agile development, iteration, delighting users, getting things done, and what functionality to take away to make an API more elegant. In Bangladesh, a family is considered to be moved out of poverty only if it meets 10 criteria along the lines of “all family members sleep on a bed”, and “family uses sanitary latrine”.

Anyone else wanna get stuff done and delight some users? Via Kiva.org, I just lent $25 to Margaret Namyalo, a restaurant owner in Uganda who takes care of 3 orphaned children on top of her own 3. (As of this posting, she still needs some more funds.) I also just added a payroll deduction to the Yahoo! Employee Foundation, which will be matched by our founders and distributed via employee-initiated grants to worthy organizations.

But that’s just doing my bit as an individual contributor in other people’s systems. What I’m really thinking about is how to build more systems that change The System. And how we might be able to leverage and/or hack Yahoo!’s global platform to do that.
I also feel very good about my choice to skip the latest overpriced confab. There are more important things to do. Like rethinking what innovation, incubation, and platforms – three words I rarely fail to use in a day — can really mean.

Fred W. had an interesting post the other day suggesting user-controlled pages on Flickr that both echoed some things I’ve been thinking about and led me to Scott Karp’s interesting essay on the Death of the User (choice quote: “In most cases ‘users’ in Media 2.0 are defined as the ‘people formerly known as the audience’”).

My own thinking on this stems from my continual amazement at the way MySpace, which many observers rightly note as a tipping point in the mainstreaming of blogging and personal publishing, perhaps even more importantly fuses general communication and content consumption with content publication. MySpace is not just outbound; it is email inbox 2.0. (And people wonder why mobile hasn’t taken off.)

At the same time, services like flickr and YouTube and Twitter, and technologies like tagging and RSS, continue to arrive to serve specific types of content production and community well (or at least interestingly). And those of us that have crossed into this world of personal & social transparency (a rubicon it seems) will inevitably continue to experiment with and invest in the most compelling.

This leads to a three-fold problem: As a user, I want to aggregate the things I consume effectively and across all of my consumption devices and venues. I may want to publish my aggregation in various ways in various media, like a blogroll on my blog, bookmarks on del.icio.us, or an OPML file or attention stream in a conference panel bio. (Thus, “distributed aggregation”.) Also, as I chime in with my comments and ratings and other UGC submissions, this becomes part of the publishing side of the problem as well.

As a publisher, I want to streamline my production across many points of access while providing a good, unified experience to some members of my audience. I may want to be able to control my profile pages at Flickr and other places - both to reflect my self-expression goals and to capture data that lets me know how I’m doing - but I don’t want to be responsible for maintaining 13 websites. I want the principle of “write once / publish many” to apply not only to my blog posts, but also to my preferences as a publisher. Thus, aggregated distribution.

Finally, from the point of view of efficiency and value-creation, there is a lot of interesting attention that could be harnessed (and fat in the system that could be eliminated) for the benefit of advertisers, knowledge-aggregation companies like Yahoo! and Google, and, more generally, anyone who wants to communicate with like audiences either in niches or en masse (i.e., media) efficiently. Again, aggregated distribution.

There are more than a few companies playing successfully at solving parts of these problems - NetVibes, and TACODA come to mind along with others, as do features introduced by Yahoo! and Google to blend some aspects of communication (mail and IM, email and RSS). There have also been some interesting attempts that haven’t quite taken root (e.g., Rojo). But there’s a lot left to do to solve the problem of “distributed aggregation” of content publishing, and I think this is a problem that will continue to resonate and drive valuable innovation this year.

Related to this problem of course is the need for an effective way to manage identity and privacy: it’s easy for me if I can have one list of friends not 12, but I don’t want all my business friends to see all of my flickr posts, I probably don’t want all of my business research behaviors impacting my behaviorally targeted advertising, and I certainly don’t want to publish my bookmarks and shopping behaviors related to sensitive personal topics. At the same time, managing preferences and terminology across all the different social venues I participate in is a pain in the ass.

I would expect some interesting entries that come at this problem in ways we haven’t seen before (and probably also better, easier-to-use versions of things we have). I would also expect some of the GEMAYA properties and “anchor tenants” in the core related businesses (UGC, news and content aggregation, search, advertising) to make moves toward more effectively meshing content production, consumption, and identity. Hopefully, there will be both good internal innovation here and plenty of interesting M&A opportunities.

Finally, I’m gonna go ahead and make one actual prediction: that at least one “unexpected” large company will participate impactfully in this reader/publisher/attention/identity fabric.

Ok, this is the third and last time I will try to write this post - the first was interrupted over the weekend, and the 2nd completed-but-deleted. (And in the meantime, many of my prospective tagees have been spoken for.) Anyway, it went something like this. . .

This game is silly and i routinely delete chain emails without reading them, but it is [was] a rainy day. . . and something about this “chain post” game appeals to me. Maybe it’s the chance to obtain interesting new tidbits about my friends tagged herein, assuming I can think of five fresh victims who blog.

1. Because the person indirectly responsible for my being tagged is apparently a lady who loves cool James, I have to represent: I acquired and edited LL Cool J’s autobiography, spent a lot of time in limos with him, and once appeared in The Source after being photograhed at a party with him (not pictured: Heavy D, Russell Simmons). As a result of that, I became, for one brief shining moment, a go-to guy in the publishing industry for rap autobiograhies, and subsequently signed “Rev” Run.
2. I never ate a hamburger until about 2 years ago. Really. Much of my childhood was spent hoping there would be hotdogs at the barbeque and special-ordering non-apocryphal grilled cheeses at McD’s - which occasionally had to be asked for from strict cashiers as “cheeseburger hold the meat”. In fact, my friends called me Herb, after the mercifully short-lived ad campaign about the only guy in America who’d never eaten a Whopper(tm). Today, I love steak and burgers - but only really really good ones.
3. Speaking of restaurants, my favorite in LA isn’t - it’s a taco stand called Yuca’s. Maybe the only taco stand ever to win a James Beard award. If you don’t believe me, the chowhound review — or $1.79 — will definitely convince you.
4. I discovered my neighborhood - and Yuca’s for that matter - via a home exchange arranged on the internet with a complete stranger, who has now become a good friend. I think home exchange rocks and have spent a good deal of time looking at it as a niche travel business.
5. I am probably the only person you’ll ever meet with a Master’s in Victorian literature who can also adjust the carbeurator and valves of an air-cooled VW (pictured below with my cousin Jarret).
6. As a bonus, I can use all of the above in a true sentence: I am often seen driving my ghia to Yuca’s with my friend Nelson, who sometimes gets a burger (yes, they sell burgers there) - though we rarely listen to LL on the way.

Now the hard part. Ok, consider yourselves tagged: Spencer, Cameron, Sean, Goff, and Scott (who can hopefully do it in photos).

Once in a while, the Upcoming robot drops a reminder on you that lights the night up like a light bulb. So it was with Billy Bragg’s show at the Fonda last night - I was on my way somewhere else but decided to drop by and was “miracled” by the bouncer when I asked if the show was sold out. I wandered in just in time to get a beer, work my way up to the footlights, and watch the curtain rise on a shuffling working-class griot who would get my vote for a Macarthur “genius” grant if they gave them to foreigners (and if I had a vote).

Billy Bragg has been an integral part of my soundtrack for years, especially since living in England. “There is no real substitue for a bull struck squarely and firmly”, indeed. I just fell years ago for his ability to connect the emotional and the political, and I’ve been a believer ever since. He’s passionate about his beliefs, and those beliefs — in the common denomitators that connect humans to one another, and that our political systems and the people atop them too often lose sight of that - radiate from his jangly, soulful pop songs. There’s also something about his permanently unrequited adolescence & imperfection that appeals to me.

Last night he played unacommpanied electric guitar for the whole set (until the encore, when he switched to acoustic), doing bang-up takes on a number of my favorites like “Greetings to the New Brunette”, “A Lover Sings”, “World Turned Upside Down”, etc., as well as a couple of his terrific Woody Guthrie covers and a Leadbelly song. He sounded fantastic.

Equally enjoyable were his rants about everything from starbucks to a hamster eating a biscuit on youtube - and he was by turns serious as well, telling us about his book and sharing a powerful view on the importance of singer-songwriters in bringing together like-spirited people (I’ve written about this before) to recharge our collective batteries. I guess it’s social networking the old-fashioned way - though he did invite us all to join his Myspace, and changed a favorite lyric of mine to “If you’ve got a website / I wanna be on it”.

If you don’t know Billy, go buy some.

Setting aside the fact that the TSA is outsourcing its knowledge base without even getting the company providing it to domain-map, the picture says it all. Original link to the TSA here.