Google Experimental Labs: Google Social Search

I was checking out Google Experimental Labs and stumbled upon this interesting experiment called Google Social Search. Google Social Search is basically an added element to your search results based on public content from your social circle. Your social circle is a combination of Gmail chat buddies, contacts, and people you are publically connected to on social sites such as Twitter and Friendfeed. In order to use Google Social Search, you must be logged into your Google account, and go to www.google.com/experimental to Join the experiment. Do a search, and if there is web content relevant by people in your social circle, you will see these results on the bottom of the search results. You can also click on '+ Show options' on the top of the result page, and choose 'Social' under All Results.

Here is an example of a search I did for ‘iphone case.’ Choosing only options from Social search, I can see if anyone in my social circle mentions ‘iphone case,’ on twitter. In this case, a friend of mine mentions a Hello Kitty iPhone case, which allows me to read about it.

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There is a great video that illustrates what social search is and how it can be used. I think Google Social Search is pretty interesting, as it shows results from your connections, allowing you to read about your friends’ opinions on certain products, services or topics.

Interesting Facebook News This Week

This week, a bunch of Facebook news has made the rounds. Just incase you're not aware, here is what the buzz is regarding Facebook.

Facebook acquired Friendfeed which will only make for a better Facebook feed in the future. Since Friendfeed is mainly a site where users can share all their social media profiles in one place, I'm sure its team up with Facebook can only mean bigger and better things.

Facebook has decided to launch Facebook Lite, which is a lighter version of Facebook, which has been said that it kind of looks like a Facebook version of a Twitter stream. From what I've seen, Facebook lite reminds me of an interface that is more mobile friendly, but right now, its being tested on a limited amount of users.

Facebook launches a real time search feature on their website. This new search function even comes up with results from the web, powered by Bing. Now you can search for a company, and view web results outside of Facebook, as well as within Facebook. It was also mentioned that status updates will have the ability to be found publicly and not just if a user is signed into Facebook, which I found to be interesting. This would mean that Facebook search would be in competition with Twitter search.