Webware

One of my favorite companies from the January, 2008 Demo conference was Delver, a search engine that takes into consideration who your friends are and what they've said and bookmarked in its results. I liked the idea in January (see Damn clever: Delver makes search social) and I like it still--I've brought it up in several posts since then.

I finally got a chance to try it out, as you can today, now that the site has gone into open alpha testing. At the current time, it's cooler in theory than in practice, but there is a ton of potential here.

Once you tell Delver who you are, it builds your social graph by itself. It correlates your identities across sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook, Digg, and more, and creates a list of who your friends are. It also layers in a list of your friends of friends. Then, when you search for something, it gives precedence to content and links from your friends and their friends. So if you're looking for an Italian restaurant recommendation in New York, you'll get results from people you know, or people your friends vouch for. Delver CEO Liad Agmon clearly believes that online content from people you know is more valuable than generic Google results. He says, "The Web is no longer just a collection of documents. It's made up of microcontributions."

In this query, Delver gave me a search result from a guy who went to the same college as Josh, who's in the first ring of my social network.

You can also help Delver build your social search graph by feeding it sites and blogs where you hang out and have friends. Or to really supercharge it, feed it your FriendFeed page, where the "fusion" of multiple online personalities is already coded in. But you don't have to do this, and that's one of Delver's very cool features: It discovers your network on its own.

Delver can only extract results from people who post content or link to Web pages. If your friends are quiet online, you won't get much in the way of relevant personal responses. But you can, if you like, define anyone as your "search buddy," and then when you search, the results they would get become yours. You can even set up multiple search buddies to blend together the results from several people who have good online networks.

In using Delver, I liked how it told me the relationship of the person whose results it gave me. Some results came from my direct contacts, some from friends of friends, and some were selected because they were from people who went to the same school I did or worked in the same company.

However, in the alpha, I often got random (non-friend) results ahead of results from my social circle. Also, Delver doesn't index Twitter, and won't directly do so, according to Agmon. All those tiny posts would clog the Delver engine. Instead, eventually, Delver will clump Twitter posts into groups and index those intermediate pages. (Which doesn't explain how Summize manages to index Twitter.)

Coming later, possibly at the TechCrunch 50 event, will be a widget for bloggers: a "grey-label" search solution that gives blog readers an opportunity to get search results filtered by writers' social networks. Agmon says this will let bloggers "become prisms to the world," for their readers. We've seen custom search engines before (Eurekster, Rollyo), but this does sound like a nice add-on product for Delver.

Delver is well-funded, which is important since search is an expensive problem to solve. The company will make money the old-fashioned way: From search advertising. Agmon has not yet revealed which advertising network his company will use.

Related posts:
Google's view: Three trends in social networking
Social networking meets search: Sightix
All Webware stories mentioning Delver

The social network companies just left the stage at Demo 2008. Looking for inspiration from the group, I got this: The future of social networking will belong to companies that leverage the implicit, or derived, "social graph." I do not think that companies that are trying to create new online communities (from the Demo companies: iLeonardo, HubDub, AtlasPost) will own the future.

However, companies that divine the social network from what is already online are on to something. In that group there's Delver, which I reviewed last night, and these two interesting companies from the Demo session that just ended:

YouChoose: This company has just built a talk back widget for blogs. What's interesting about it is that instead of just running a comment thread for a blogger, it collates the discussion from other blogs and sites. It brings together sparse communities and can help make them richer and more active.

I have some issues with the YouChoose concept--in particular, bloggers that use it won't have a tight link to their commenters--but the idea of automatically creating groups around content is powerful.

Redux: This is a smart idea. It's a matchmaking site (for friends, not hookups, but that's really up to you). You tell it who you are and answer questions about your interests, and it recommends people from its network that it thinks you will like hanging out with. It can also suggest events you will both may like. It even has an "entourage" feature that groups recommended friends into posses and suggests events for all of you.

The key difference here is that you don't have to start by building your network. It kind of does that for you.

Redux is a membership site, which is not ideal. You have to join it and tell it about yourself, and it matches you with people also on the network. But I don't see why the idea can't be extended to scan existing social sites and profiles (assuming they open up) to match people even if they're not on the same social site you are.

Dude. Beer?

People are getting social network fatigue. There are too many social sites and they are too different. It takes too much time and effort to manage your online relationships. The companies that figure out how to leverage online content and help manage your relationship data for you are the ones that will own the next phase of online social networking.

Results are based on the contributions of your friends (and their friends).

This is one of the most innovative ideas at Demo 2008: Delver, a search engine that displays results for you based on what your friends and contacts are doing online. First, you tell it your name, and it scans the usual social networks to find out who your friends are. At this early stage of development, it scans LinkedIn, MySpace, Hi5, and Flickr, but Facebook and Twitter will be added.

Once Delver discovers who you know (and also who's in your extended circle--your friends of friends), it uses that data to return search results. For example, if you're searching for "Las Vegas," it will return pictures your friends took in Vegas, blog posts they've written about trips there, or even posts where they are just mentioned. It also finds Yelp reviews they've written about restaurants in Vegas, and so on. And you do not have to tell Delver that a MySpace friend also has a Yelp ID; the system's core technology draws the line from your explicit connections to their other contributions on the Web.

Delver will not replace old reliable Google. It delivers different results for each person, not consistent results for everyone. And to some extent, the quality of your results will depend on the quality of your social network. But it may well change the way you look at search. Instead of searching the sum of human knowledge (or close to it), Delver searches through the collective wisdom of your friends and associates. It's a great new idea.

The service will be presented at Demo 2008 on Wednesday. The private beta launch is planned for March.