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Lucrative future for people network orientated services
Over the past few weeks Yahoo has purchased a number of small startup 'social community' orientated websites/webservices, including Flickr and delicious. In an article in The Guardian technology section about the bright future of online people network services in light of Yahoo's recent acquisitions, journalist Bobbie Johnson talks to Yahoo's senior director of technology development, and speculates on the future importance of online social software services that use tags.
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Excerpts from 'Searching for a fresher taste' by Bobbie Johnson
Published in The Guardian technology supplement
Thursday December 15, 2005
"You can probably stitch together our plan from the moves we've made, the acquisitions we've made, the products we've put out to market," says Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo's senior director of technology development. That plan: to try and make social search the next stage in the evolution of search engines.
"In topology search, what you're really doing is conferring to webmasters the privilege of deciding what's important for everybody. They cast their votes on what's important by building links - and they do it in a way that smears it out for everybody, so we all get the same results." The concept of personal search and social search, he says, "democratises that process, and says 'why should webmasters be the only authority we trust and confer that privilege to?'. Why can't I pick other authorities of trust, like for instance my friends? What is their opinion?"
So instead of getting the same results as everybody who searches a term, you get results that are filtered through your social group. You choose your own peers - friends, family, colleagues, interesting strangers - and they provide your answers. And by including different levels of friendship, you can increase the size of your net dramatically. Even if you have just 10 contacts, and those contacts have another 10 each, that's still more than 100 potential sources within two hops. The concept is useful, perhaps, but maybe not for everyone.
Users enjoy the extra power: communities become self-policing and popular taggers become trusted sources, gaining minor celebrity along the way. Providers enjoy it, too, for taking some of the heavy lifting away from them.
Now, he says, the next step will be to take social bookmarking - exactly the activity promoted by Delicious - and turn it into the basis for wider web searching. His proposition involves using the social network as the channel for search results.
More important to a huge business such as Yahoo is how social search could bring new ways to cash in. Search engine firms make money through advertising, and in the short run, a tighter focus increases the likelihood of being able to charge higher prices for ads. In the long run, social groups might emerge inside the search engine - for example, a group of doctors in Hong Kong who share their bookmarks - who could be specifically targeted by advertising campaigns.
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/ for complete article
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Online social community network based services (such as MySpace) have already become a phenomenon in their own right. What this article, and Yahoo's movements, point to is a future internet entirely driven by such services. Placement within this area could result in high economic gain through sponsorship/buyout, or at the very least notoriety as an exponent/guru in this field, as yet another net trend bubbles to the top of the international media's agendas.
Originally posted at: http://www.rho-d.co.uk/iptvuk/index.php?section=5