The Future of Search: Social Relevancy Rank

FriendFeed has recently launched a search feature, and so Facebook search must be coming soon.

Real-time Web search (of streams of activities) is a hot topic right now. Everyone, including Google and Microsoft, recognizes the value of using trusted contacts as filters. What was once called social search is now called real-time search, but this time it will really happen. First, it will be applied to streams and then to the Web in general.

What we are about to get is a Social Relevancy Rank. Whenever you search streams of activity, the results will be ordered not chronologically but by how relevant each is to you based on your social graph. That is, people who matter more to you will bubble up. How does this work? Well, there will be a formula, just as there is a formula for Page Rank.

Solution 101: Rank by Friends and People You Follow

Here is an idea so obvious that it is surprising Twitter has not implemented it already: front-load search results with people you follow. When you search for, say, "Wilco" on Twitter today, the results are in the chronological order. That is not really relevant because you do not know who most of these people are. But if instead you could see people you follow, the search results would be much more useful.

This is not possible on Twitter today, but it already works great on FriendFeed. There, results are filtered or ranked based your social graph. This is not difficult for FriendFeed to do because, on the one hand, it knows who you care about and, on the other, it applies its advanced feed search technology to your social graph:

This sounds awesome, but there is a problem. "Wilco" works well as a query because the band has just released a new album, but many other queries would return no results. Simply put, your friends on Facebook and people you follow on Twitter can't possibly have an opinion on every topic you may be interested in. This is a problem of sparse data: trusted opinions are scarce.

Small Worlds and Taste Neighbors

To solve the problem of sparse data, we need more data... obviously. One possible solution is to incorporate other sources that you trust (i.e. broaden your social graph). As a next step, search results could rank people you may not be directly following but who are being followed by people you follow. Or in Facebook-speak, friends of friends. You could argue that you are not familiar with their opinions and so cannot yet trust them, but given the small world phenomenon, their contributions are often just as valuable.

Another step could be to include people with similar tastes, so-called taste neighbors. This approach is common among vertical social networks such as Last.fm, Flixster, and Goodreads. These networks have ideas about which people, other than your friends, are like you. However, this is a costly calculation and takes time. In order for Twitter to do something like this, it would have to compare people based on links or perform semantic analyses of tweets over time. Yet even though this is a difficult problem, it will be solved in time.

The Influencers and the Crowd

Aside from using the "second degree" of your social graph or taste neighbors, a Social Relevancy Rank could front-load influencers. In the absence of any other metric, someone who is followed by hundreds of thousands of users is likely more relevant to you than someone you don't know at all. Using number of followers as a weight might be a good way to order the rest of the activity stream.

In general, combing through countless tweets from strangers is not terribly useful anyway. Just as people have stopped looking at anything beyond the first page of results on Google, sifting through pages of tweets in chronological order gets tedious quickly. What needs to be incorporated into the Social Relevancy Rank is the aggregate sentiment of the crowd: a score that tells you yay or nay and gives you an opportunity to drill into more results if you choose.

The Quest for the Perfect Filter

There is no such thing as a perfect formula. Even Page Rank isn't perfect. Yet we all use it and find it useful. Much as Page Rank has been adapted and tuned to search the web, Social Relevancy Rank will evolve over time to help us make sense of endless streams of activity. This ranking will have a profound impact on how we tap into our friends' opinions.

It will change the face of general Web searches in time, too. Today, results are automatically ranked by relevancy and freshness. Once Social Relevancy Rank is factored in, search results will be re-ordered based on social relevancy.

Related articles:

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/technorati-to-launch-twittorati.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-unveils-new-search-features.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/twitter-search-to-index-pages-and.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/yahoo-upgrades-search-engine.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/search-sucks-and-microsoft-is-almost.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/searching-for-meaning-of-bing.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/microsoft-must-buy-twitter-msft.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/ballmer-on-bing-economy-and-more.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/china-google-and-pornography.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-they-might-be-little-evil.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/wolfram-alpha-has-google-attention.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/26-people-who-mislead-you-on-twitter.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/ballmer-all-traditional-content-will-be.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/rate-of-tweets-per-second-doubles.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-unveils-sms-service-for-africa.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/yahoo-ceo-stop-comparing-us-to-google.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/future-of-facebook-usernames.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/googles-schmidt-rips-microsofts-bing.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/history-and-future-of-computer-memory.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/kosmix-tries-to-avoid-google-search.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/dispute-finder-intel-program-finds.html

Source:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/future_of_search_social_relevancy_rank.php

Tags:

FriendFeed search feature, Facebook search, real-time Web search, Google, Twitter, Twitter search, PageRank, Microsoft, trusted contacts as filters, social search, Global IT News, Social Relevancy Rank, metrics,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Ballmer: All Traditional Content Will Be Digital In 10 Years

Steve Ballmer said Wednesday that the global advertising economy has been permanently “reset” at a lower level, warning that media companies should not plan for revenues to bounce back to pre-recession levels.

Speaking at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, Ballmer argued that traditional broadcast and print media would have to plan business models around a smaller share of the advertising market, as revenues continue to move to digital outlets. “I don’t think we are in a recession, I think we have reset,” he said. “A recession implies recovery [to pre-recession levels] and for planning purposes I don’t think we will. We have reset and won’t rebound and re-grow.”

Ballmer, named media person of the year at this year’s festival, also painted a bleak picture for the future of traditional media, arguing that newspaper publishers have failed to generate new revenues from the digital opportunity. He said that within 10 years all traditional content will be digital and yet, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) aside, publishers are failing to generate serious digital revenues.

“All content consumed will be digital, we can [only] debate if that may be in one, two, five or 10 years,” added Ballmer. “There won’t be [only traditional] newspapers, magazines and TV programmes. There won’t be [only] personal, social communications offline and separate. In 10 years it will all be online. Static content won’t cut it in the future,” he added.

“Some say that the ad-funded model has not led to profitability. Google’s search site makes money but past Google is there a publisher with an ad-funded or fee-based model that has made lots of money? No.”

For media businesses to successfully evolve they must provide the right combination of context and relevance to make a compelling online proposition for consumers, according to Ballmer. “There are problems with digital advertising. Start with content and the website environment and [ask] is it suitable for advertising. [That] question is somewhat in the balance as we move forward,” he said. The old approach of simply trying to replicate a print newspaper online is doomed to fail, Ballmer added.

During a question and answer session after his speech, Ballmer was also asked about Microsoft’s interest in acquiring Yahoo.“We have no interest in acquiring Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). What we have said is that we will continue to remain open to a partnership with Yahoo,” he responded.

Source: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-microsofts-ballmer-all-traditional-content-will-be-digital-in-10-years

Tags: Steve Ballmer, Microsoft, Technology Prediction, Digital content, Analog content, google, Yahoo, Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, Ad-funded model, Global Best Practice, Print media,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Microsoft gets ISO go-ahead

It's interesting to see that Microsoft is now an official standard (ISO/IEC DIS 29500), as opposed to playing the role of a de facto standard that it generally occupies.

Microsoft's "Open XML" format beat-out the rival "ODF" (Open Document format) favoured by IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., in a recent ISO vote.

According to the IT World Canada article below, the ISO has not experienced lobbying of this nature before. This is not surprising when you consider that the three firms mentioned above all have:

a) Very deep pockets
b) Experience in Washington-DC's advanced lobby-ecosystem
c) World-class technical know-how

It will be interesting to see what effect this has on both Microsoft and the ISO, and indeed what effect, if any, that this ruling has on both enterprise-level, and consumer-level documentation habits.

What do you think might come of the ODF?
http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=45515
http://www.itworldcanada.com/Pages/Docbase/ViewArticle.aspx?id=idgml-12e8db44-a77d-474d&Portal=2e5351f3-4ab9-4c24-a496-6b265ffaa88c&sub=1519551