Why Should We Combine Social Networks And Search?
from the no,-really,-I'm-asking dept
I guess it's the business plan of the new year. Look for two hot spaces that venture capitalists are drooling over... and combine them. Don't bother stopping to think if it's useful at all. Okay, consider me skeptical, but open minded on this one. A new search engine, called Eurekster, is taking the "search advertising" trend and the "social networking" trend - and combining them. That's right. You'll now be able to run your searches through your friends. Why? I have no idea. I'm trying to think of a good example of why this would ever be useful - and I'm coming up blank. The idea is to personalize search results, and to pool a local set of users to figure out what might be more relevant. The problem with this, though, is that I imagine the things I search for are very different than what my friends search for the vast majority of the time. In the few areas where it's likely we'd overlap, I'm not sure what the benefit of having it tied in with them would be.
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Is it too late to patent this?
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Eurekster
Here is how I plan to use Eurekster. Maybe you'll derive some use from this. If not, be sure to criticize it as quickly as possible...
What I am looking for in my eureksters (ie people in my eurekster network) is the following. I intend to only have people in my eurekster social network that are interested in social software, search engines, online marketing and event promotion. I will also limit my searches on eurekster to these topics. This way, my social network will help me determine the most important stuff going on in my chosen space(s) of interest.
More at a new blog I started....
http://eureksterblog.blogspot.com/2004_01_21_eureksterblog_archive.html
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Sounds cool but....
The idea is different but scary. I wish them a lot of luck with that one.
I would rather join backwash.com than to join some social search engine.
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