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Google announces social search

Google's Marissa Mayer announced an upcoming opt-in feature for Google search that will return social network related results from people in your contact list. Part of this will include Twitter integration, which was reported earlier this week. How might this look?

This move is directed at countering Facebook's dominance in social search. The idea is that users want more relevant related search results and that means reading about thoughts and experiences from influencers in your social network, not necessarily anonymous results which Google is great at.

Salmon Protocol proposed

Conversations on the web often take place in a silo, never making it back to the source of the content. For example, if I post an article on Idealist and other users repost the link to their blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other sites, comments left on those networks stay on those networks. If I want to know more about what people are thinking about the story, I have to look for their responses. A proposal called Salmon Protocol, authored by John Panzer of Blogger, aims to change that.

The idea is to "unify the conversations in all places, both upstream and downstream…The proposed Salmon Protocol would similarly watch both source and destination sites for comments, and upon discovering new comments, it would send the new comments to the site which is lacking the full conversation. If multiple downstream destinations are designated, the Salmon Protocol will also populate these multiple sites."

This could cause some confusion and take a bit of getting used to, but ultimately it will take the conversation out of the silos and onto the greater web, promoting dialogue and discovery.

Flickr adds people tagging

You can now tag the people in your photos by either adding them from your Flickr contact list or by adding their email address.

When you’re tagged in a photo, it will show up in your recent activity stream. And Flickr has revamped users’ profiles to show pictures you’re tagged in.