Yahoo! Social
It looks like the other foot is dropping into this race. We've already heard hints that Microsoft is planning to enter the fray (potentially via the widely deployed MSN Messenger / Passport system. Yesterday, Yahoo! announced that they are looking at the use of social networks for their own needs.
"A lot of the Web is about sharing," Cadogan said, speaking to an audience at Stanford Business School's first annual technology conference.
He pointed to a fairly new feature from Yahoo that lets people in remote locations search simultaneously by using IM environments in Yahoo instant messenger. "This is just the beginning. A lot more will come from that," said Cadogan, a former executive at Overture Services who joined Yahoo before it bought the commercial search pioneer.
Source: News.com, "Yahoo hints at social networking service"
I'm actually more interested in a brief summary that occurred in the speech, addressing the hotspots in search as a whole. As he notes, there are three major fronts along which search is growing:
- Social Networking
- Localization
- Personalization
I'm somewhat interested in thinking about where the convergence of these tools and needs will take us. As best I can see, and as others such as Stowe, have already highlighted, is that social networking is not a fad at all. The internet was founded on TCP/IP, a fundamental protocol for transmitting data. Naturally, the users of the system, us humans, have pushed that to its limits - and it's hurt in many ways. Hardly a day goes by where I don't here some comment about spam, privacy, or other forces that are problems of the wild-west mentality of the original Internet.
Today, we are starting to see breeds of systems and applications that "understand" networks. Now that we're becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of identifying and solidifying our personal social networks, more and more businesses and people alike are realizing that there is tremendous leverage to be gained. In this next era, we will see these forms of boundary and relationship markings put to use almost as the human version of TCP/IP. Social networks stand to marshal information, not data, between information consumers, not computers.
What will our world look like once we've submitted to this more and more? Anyone remember Minority Report? Did you like it or not?