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Last fall Google began experimenting with a new feature called Social Search, and we called it a big chess move against Facebook. Today Google Social Search is opening up in beta for all Google users. The experimental feature will surface search results from the social streams (bookmarks, blog posts, photos, etc.) of a user's contacts on services like Gmail, Google Reader or Twitter.

Social Search still doesn't have a super-prominent place in the Google Search results pages, but make no mistake: This is a very big step. What's your portal to the Internet: Google's algorithmic search of the Web at large, or your social circle of people on Facebook? That's the battle for the future that Google and Facebook are waging now, and Google Social Search is a big move. Facebook search is nowhere near as good.

The future of search almost certainly involves social networks, social graphs, or social filtering in some capacity. Companies will live or die by whether they get the "social" part right: creating the right level of intimacy, trust, reliability, social connectedness, and accuracy in their results listings. Of course, this specifically means that their user experience must at least meet or, preferably, exceed that of Google's.

To achieve this, we must first stop arguing over the different flavors of search.

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.

Today from AdaptiveBlue there comes a new version of the semantic browser extension Glue (previous coverage) which allows you to create a browser-based social network around the things you and your friends find online. This latest release, four months in the making, finally makes Glue compatible with Internet Explorer - a move which Glue's creators hope will allow them to tap into a wider, more mainstream audience.

There's a lot of information about many of us spread around the web and though privacy is important to discuss - there's also another side of that coin. It can be very useful to tie together info from disparate sources about a particular individual. Today I saw a tool for finding those various profile pages that really impressed me.

About this time last year Google's Brad Fitzpatrick, also the creator of OpenID, led the development of the Google Social Graph API. It's a search engine for all the webpages that we identify as profiles online and it tracks the connections between pages linked together for a single person. At a small event today in Sebastapol, California, British developer Glenn Jones demonstrated the most compelling tool I've seen yet for leveraging this powerful technology.

Red hot TV and movie site Hulu has added a major new feature this morning on the one year anniversary of the site. Logged in users are now able to securely pull in their list of contacts from Facebook, Google, MySpace, MSN and Yahoo. The company calls it "Hulu Friends." Though some skeptics have questioned the impact of social video watching, this kind of move is exactly what we've been hoping all sites around the web would do.

Identity providers are now making it easy for 3rd party content sites to turn content consumption into a social activity. From real-time conversation to recommendations, there's a whole lot of potential here. That said, we do have some concerns about Hulu's implementation.

Long time innovator Marc Canter has made a proposal for a system to let users integrate all their social networks from around the web into one central dashboard. He calls it the DiSO Dashboard.

So far it's just a vision, albeit a pretty specific one, but we expect to see something like this on the market very soon. Is it what you want? Now is a good time to share your thoughts on the subject.

Google just announced that it is relaunching its Google Help Forums and we believe the changes are likely to be extended to all Google Groups forums in the future. The new forums include some great new features and utilize the new Google Profiles extensively.

Highlighted changes include reputation, designation of "top contributors," standards-based profiles that extend across Google products and the web, and the ability for Google staff and top contributors to mark some questions as answered.

Do you like to know what sort of music, movies, books, and other things your friends like? If so, you have a couple of options for following your friends' interests on the web today. You can either join a social network dedicated to sharing this information (think Goodreads, Flixster, Last.fm) or you can follow your friends on lifestreaming service like FriendFeed where you might happen upon a shared interest somewhere in their stream of updates. A third option would be to only see your friends' interests in context when you were actively viewing a book, movie, album, etc. on the web.

this February, Google released its Social Graph API, which allows developers to give users the option to easily find data on their social connections around the web. Google itself, however, hasn't really implemented any of this technology yet. Starting today, however, it seems Google is starting to surface some of this information from your Social Graph in your Google Profile, which might be a first sign that Google is planning to do more with these profiles than it has done so far. Google has also started implementing the hCard microformat there. The first person to noticed this was Chris Messina.

With the news coming out of F8 this week, it was hard to not get caught up in the enthusiasm for Facebook Connect, the new authentication methodology which will allow you to login to third-party web sites using your Facebook ID and port your friend graph from Facebook with you. On the one hand, you have to admit this is revolutionary. The web will be transformed from the still (somewhat) closed system it is today, to a massively social experience - it's the "always logged-in internet." On the other hand, the company bringing this web to us is Facebook, the same people who had to be told by their users why Beacon was a huge mistake. Do you trust Facebook to control the next iteration of the web?

Information overload is a topic that keeps coming up, especially among users of social media services. As you add more friends and more services, the amount of content produced can become overwhelming to keep up with which leads to quality items being lost amongst the "noise." Noise-reducing apps like AideRSS or Moopz (both of which we love) highlight the best content, but their one drawback is that they determine relevance based on what the community thinks - and that may or may not be what you find interesting or important. With the new social search service from Delver, however, you can leverage your social graph to find just the information you're looking for from the people you admire and/or trust and that makes finding content a much more personal experience.

Signal Patterns, makers of scientific-based social web apps, have just released a Facebook app whose goal is to help you find new friends based on an in-depth personality assessment algorithm. This app matches people based on their unique personality traits - not just "rough" personality types. If that sounds a lot like some dating web sites you've heard of...well, you're right. Signal Patters is essentially offering eHarmony for Facebook except instead of love connections, they hope to offer you a better way to find friends. The question is, is that something we need?

Yahoo! announced today at the Web 2.0 Expo the availability of the first program in its large vision for a dramatic overhaul of the company across all its properties. The Search Monkey developer platform will let site owners alter their search results listing, including through semantic markup. Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch has an in-depth review of that platform.

Search Monkey is just the first of many steps that Yahoo! discussed today. CTO Ari Balogh said that the entire company was rewiring, across all its properties, in the spirit of the social graph and data portability. Flickr's influence was tangible. Here's a high-level overview of some of the biggest changes.

O'Reilly's Graphing Social Patterns conference, which was held this week in San Diego, brought together key people who are shaping the newly born social platforms industry; platform providers, app makers, investors, advertising networks, etc. Our own Sean Ammirati was one of the speakers and has already covered some of the most important bits from the conference, including Charlene Li's keynote. In this post, we'll quickly recap and highlight some of the important announcements and important data that we were able to extract. We also have a short interview with RockYou! founder and CTO Jia Shen.

Charlene Li gave the opening keynote at today's Graphing Social Patterns conference. The keynote was titled "The Future of Social Networks" and Charlene clarified that specifically she was focused on five to ten years out in her presentation. Her basic thesis is that in the future, 'social networks will be like air.' In other words, it will be ubiquitous as you navigate across the web and sites will feel inadequate (like you can't breathe) if a user's social network isn't part of the experience.

The most impressive thing about the new search engine Delver is that it knows who you are and who
your friends are even if you don't import your address book or add your social
networking profiles. Instead, Delver leverages the social graph to map out a
user's social connections. Since everyone's social graph is unique, like a
fingerprint, the same query will yield vastly different results for each user.
The results are more personal and meaningful to users than a generic search
using "normal" search engine.

I love me some screenscaping and mashups and data portability, but when it comes to personal information things get a little more complicated.

I'm in San Francisco today at Dappercamp, an event concerning a tool that's always got the rights of those it interfaces with in mind as an issue. Keynote speaker Mitch Kapor just told the group that the foundations of the web are sharing and openness and that intellectual property rights online should be constructed around and respecting those qualities.

It was a refreshing way to frame the often contentious relationship between corporate content publishers and those of us on the margins seeking to mash things up, but similar issues are beginning to arise in terms of personal and interpersonal information about users.

Although only announced hours ago, Plaxo's
Pulse is already using the new Google Social Graph API. They got a head
start due to a collaborative effort between their Chief Platform Architect, Joseph Smarr, and Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick. Now, the Plaxo public profile
pages will serve as the flagship example of what this new API has to offer.

Google today announced the release of a new API for graphing social net connections on the web at large. The Social Graph API is a way for developers of social applications to let users easily find data on their social connections across the open web. The information the API returns can be useful in helping users locate and add their friends when starting up at a new social application.