social networks

Wednesday Mashable reported that Microsoft signed a deal with Facebook and Twitter to include status updates in Bing’s search results

Yesterday Mashable is reporting the announcement that Google will be unveiling social search

- The bottom of search results will soon have social networking information from your friends, like their Flickr photos or their status updates. It’s a blended search integration, similar to seeing news or image results.

- These are pulled from social networks connected to your Google Profile. The more that are connected, the more social information that will appear in search results.

- They have also improved searching for images using social networks. Images become more relevant using social networking data.

- It will launch in Google Labs in the next few weeks.

So what does this mean for you and I? Your status updates will likely become available via public search, this might deter some but others might not worry–any actions we take online (for the most part) are recordable and traceable. I think marketing firms are going to gobble this new data up though to analyze trends in online conversation within groups and find new ways to micro-market within the throng of niches that new exist within online communities. For those who might not know–Facebook is already using your friends pics in ads targeted to you (you have to select no and opt out from within your profile if you don’t want your friends or your own pics exposed for this use).

The theory of our activities and search is that we are teaching the machines by providing them data. Market firs and social scientists are harvesting this data as well, the book Click: What Millions of People are doing Online and Why It Matters (is a little dry) but has a great explanation of how this data is used. The video below is also a great review from the Kansas State Dept. of Anthropology, Digital Ethnography about how the Web (and we) are evolving.

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