Webware

Delver, a search start-up that personalizes search results by paying attention to a person's social connections, has signed up for Yahoo's BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service).

BOSS lets larger search sites use Yahoo's search results, tailored in any way desired but stripped of any Yahoo branding, in exchange for showing Yahoo ads or sharing revenue. Delver plans to mix those results in with its own technology, which shows results drawn from publicly visible parts of social sites such as profiles, blogs, bookmarks, and videos. Smaller sites and academic projects can use BOSS for free.

"Leveraging Yahoo Search BOSS allows us to keep focusing on social-graph ranking and indexing, while providing our users with a solution that intelligently mixes social results with traditional Web results," Delver Chief Executive Liad Agmon said in a statement Tuesday.

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."

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

SAN FRANCISCO-- "Social is the new black," Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management, said at a talk on the company's social-computing efforts at the Supernova conference here.

Kraus' view, which can be fairly said to represent Google's, is that these are the three big trends in the social Web:

Discovery is becoming social
This was the most telling tidbit from Kraus' talk. He noted that searching on Google is good, but having your friends help you find what you're looking for is better. He gave an example of how social discovery can work--putting a status message in the IM field in Gmail and waiting for people to chime in to help you. But that is not representative of the state of the art in social discovery.

Takeaway: Look for Google to finally launch an initiative in social search. Or maybe acquire a company like Delver.

How we share is changing
Kraus says that people under-share because they don't want to appear self-important. Sending an e-mail to friends with new baby pictures, he says, requires "high social activation energy in the part of the sender," and thus slows down sharing. But guess what, he says: Your friends really do want to know what you're up to. They might not like being interrupted, but they do care.

You can see how sharing is changing on Facebook and FriendFeed, Kraus says. These sites let your friends discover what you're doing on their terms, and encourage more sharing, since you don't have to get in your friends' faces every time you update.

If you're reading tea leaves here, Kraus' mention of FriendFeed over Twitter was perhaps telling.

Social sites? No, social Web
Kraus notes that the idea of a site built around user content (like Epinions) is old-school. Today, users expect all sites to be social. They expect that if you're on a commerce site that you know your friends are also on, you can see what your friends bought there and if they liked it. Social is a feature, he says, not a destination.

This last trend, in particular, backs up what Google is doing now with Friend Connect, a new architecture that enables Web publishers to put modules on their sites that allow cross-site sharing.

Kraus also pointed to three recent standards as the key helpers to the creation of the social Web: OpenID for identity, OAuth for API authorization, and Open Social for building cross-site apps.

Previous coverage:
Google Friend Connect conference call live blog
Google brings Friend Connect to the masses
Yahoo, Google, MySpace form nonprofit OpenSocial Foundation

Here is Kraus' talk:

This morning, Wikia is rolling out cool features on the controversial Wikia Search engine (previous review).

Starting today, if you do a search on the engine and don't like the results, you'll be able to change them. Your changes will apply not just for yourself, but rather for everybody.

The engine will launch with a smallish subset of machine-indexed pages, about 30 million, which will form the baseline that Wikia Search will let users go to town on. It's "hardly a full crawl" of the Web, admits Wikia (and Wikipedia) co-founder Jimmy Wales, but it's a start.

The editing you can do on Wikia Search is extensive. If you think a result on a search result page is too low or too high in the listings, you can influence its position by rating it. You can delete entries entirely or hand-write new ones. You can also rewrite the text of a search result, including adding code to the result (to insert, perhaps, a site-specific search, like Google's search-within-search).

For people accustomed to the cold (if hidden) logic of purely algorithmic search, these are scary options. It means that your search results are, in part, up to the whims of capricious or crazy humans, or perhaps people trying to game the system to promote some sites while burying competitors.

If you're lucky, though, your search result may be positively influenced by topic experts, your friends, or just other generally well-meaning people. And that's the hope. For the most part, this philosophy works for wikis. Wales obviously thinks it will work for search as well.

I hope it does. I like the idea of an open and transparent search engine. But I'm skeptical, for the sole reason that there's more at stake in search then there is on most wikis. How sites place on search engines has a material impact on how much money they make, so the more successful this engine is, the more people there will be trying to game this system.

To counter this, Wikia Search changes are all done all wiki-style. They're transparent, and they can be reverted by users. Hopefully that will offset the gaming of the system.

One variable that won't influence Wikia Search results: your social network. If your friends rate certain sites higher than the population at large, that fact won't be reflected in the results you get.

Wales said to me, regarding the concept of sorting results individually based on their social network (see Delver), "I'm not convinced that it will be all that useful," but it could be a "piece of data we would use" in the future.

That's probably just as well; the concept of search results directly changeable by users will be weird enough for users to get a handle on.

Wales put a video demo together for Wikia Search. Click to view.

See also: Anoox.

I wouldn't say that Google is broken. But after looking at concepts by Delver (review) and Sightix, it has become clear to me how much better search can be--in theory--when it knows more about the person doing the searching, and when it knows about their social network.

Delver, a search engine that deciphers your social network, is still in private beta. Google is reportedly working on social search, but has yet to release it. According to Sightix, on May 1 it will deliver social search to Shin1, an Israeli social network.

When you search for something using the Sightix technology on a social network, it searches the content of everyone you are connected with, and ranks results gleaned from each user based on the strength of their connection to you. Ari Gottesmann, vice president of Sightix, gave me this example: Say you're searching for a nightclub. The clubs your friends talk about will get a higher relevance than your friends of friends. It's much more likely that this ranking will yield results that work for you than searching a general engine that doesn't give extra weight to your friends' recommendations.

The product also works as a people search engine of a sort. If there's a good result from someone way out in your extended network, this tool will help you connect with them.

The Sightix company, originally in the business intelligence business with customers such as Dun and Bradstreet, has given its social search product a rich and complex interface. I think it's overkill for the task at hand, but if users want to see how they're connected to the results they get, it could be fun to explore.

It's less likely that this technology will work when users are looking for something completely obscure to their networks, but I bet they would be surprised to find how much they can glean from their extended social circle with a tool such as this.

Sightix is building its search product to embed in social networks. It's not making a search destination site, which means its success hinges on embedding the technology within social networks themselves. Getting the Shin1 deal is a good first deal, and Gottesmann is working on getting the service embedded in the huge global social networks for the future.

Like my new boss, I am getting an increasing flow of bacn notices about people subscribing to my FriendFeed updates.

Many pundits, in the same boat, are wondering whether FriendFeed is the new Twitter since it serves a similar purpose: it tells you what your pals are up to. And it has the easiest and best procedure for finding and subscribing to your friends' feeds of any social-network app I've ever seen.

On Monday, the company added a handy new feature: search. This is a bit of a bigger deal that it appears at first. It's not just an incremental new feature for FriendFeed users. It actually makes the site a useful search engine--if what you're searching for is something a friend did or wrote. Like the still-unreleased Delver, this tool lets you search among items only from network of friends, ignoring the chaff on the rest of the Web.

Although the search feature is a good addition, I am still not enthralled by FriendFeed. It's not that I don't like reading updates on it. That's cool. But I cannot reasonably expect that everyone I'm currently following elsewhere will jump into FriendFeed; in fact, FriendFeed still can't natively read Facebook updates. Let's call this effect Social Network Switching Decay.

Using FriendFeed instead of, say, Twitter, is not an option thanks to switching decay and also because FriendFeed can only read from social services, not write to them (for now, anyway)--yet using it in addition to Twitter is duplicative and annoying.

I can't ignore FriendFeed entirely because of its insidious comment feature: people can leave a comment on FriendFeed in response to any item it picks up. So if I post a Twitter item or a Flickr photo, now I have to check the original sources as well as FriendFeed to see what people are saying back to me.

In sum, FriendFeed balances useful and annoying better than any app ever I've seen.

See also: Plaxo, Iminta, and a new one: OneSwirl. Previous coverage: FriendFeed tells you what your friends are up to online.

FriendFeed is leaving private beta tonight and opening up to everyone. It's a potentially useful service that aggregates what your friends are doing around the Web into one big feed you can easily scan. In other words, if you've got friends who Twitter, friends who post photos on Flickr, friends who favorite videos on YouTube, and friends who tag music on Last.fm or sites on del.icio.us, this service will keep track of them all. Except what your pals are doing on Facebook--that service was not scannable by FriendFeed in the beta version I tried.

The Web needs services like this, since it's otherwise impossible to keep track of what your pals are doing online, what with everyone participating in so many different places.

There are big issues with FriendFeed, though. The service only really works when your friends are also FriendFeed users. That way they can link all their social feeds to their accounts so they're easy for you to pick up. You can add "imaginary friends" to add nonsubscribers' feeds on other services, one by one, to your FriendFeed account, but that's time-consuming.

There are already other friend aggregation services, too. FriendFeed is commonly compared with Plaxo Pulse, which also aggregates personal feeds and also works best when your friends have taken the time to set up their accounts with their feeds. So what do you do if you have some friends on Pulse (or Iminta or on other services), and some on FriendFeed? Is it beginning to sound like we need a service to aggregate the personal feed aggregators? Is this not getting a little silly?

The thing all these sites need is auto-discovery. If I want to track my friend Joe, the personal feed tracker I use should not require Joe to put in all his feeds. It should just go find them. That is not an easy problem to solve, although there are feed aggregators that do it, such as Spokeo. Also, Delver applies auto-discovery of personal feeds to search. In the future, a universal Web site authentication system like OpenID could make auto-discovery more workable for more sites. See: Implicit social networks.

Still, I have found it enjoyable to peruse FriendFeed pages to see what a subset of my friends are writing and flagging. I don't think the technology is universal enough, yet, but it's a start.

Previous review: FriendFeed does the Facebook feed minus Facebook.

My former co-worker, Aaron Newton, is launching this week the product he quit CNET to build: Iminta (as in, "I'm inta," get it?). It's a service that aggregates all your social network feeds into one place, so your buddies can more easily keep track of what you're doing online, and vice versa.

Since Aaron's a buddy, I can't give this product a fair review (see TechCrunch for an opinion on the service itself). However, I did want to point out that Iminta has a cool thing going for it: you can put your followers in groups and specify which group sees what. For example, if you don't want your family to see all your Del.icio.us updates, you can remove that info from your family feed.

Variable privacy: You control who can see what.

When I covered Yahoo's centralized geolocation data service, Fire Eagle, I noted that it had a similar feature: You can let different followers see your data in different resolutions. For example, you could let your family know what town you're in but not precisely where, while making you exact location visible to you co-workers, but only during work hours.

Facebook and other social sites that let you group contacts have crude versions of variable privacy.

I really like the idea of variable resolution for social feeds. Maybe that's because, as an old guy (as opposed to a gen-MySpace guy), I think privacy matters and that it's not an all-or-nothing concept.

I don't think any system has yet made variable privacy manageable. However, it's a new idea, so I wouldn't expect it yet. But if the idea of the implicit social network takes off (see Delver and my take on self-building social sites), we are going to desperately need variable privacy.

See also: Profilactic and Plaxo.

There was a good, but not earthshaking, lineup of products at this year's Demo 2008 conference (see all stories). The show didn't offer any new products to capture the hearts and minds of the general public or even a majority of the tech elite. There was no Pleo, no Moobella, no Palm Pilot--all products introduced at Demo in years past. But there were several very strong new ideas and products here. These are my top picks.

Blist. This is the Flash- and Flex-based database I raved about yesterday. It is the database that FileMaker should have become by now--and it's all online. It has rich features and a gorgeous front-end that's simple when you want it to be yet also supports complex table design. Read: Blist: Awesome Web-based database.

Blist is also part of another story at Demo: The rise of Flash applications. See also Spout, a killer Flash authoring environment, and Joggle, an AIR application that manages your photos, no matter where they are stored. The design and usability of these applications put many "traditional" software competitors to shame. And they're all cross-platform.

Delver, a search engine with a strong social twist. It returns search results from people in your social circle, and ranks them according to relevance and strength of connection to you. It's no replacement for Google, but if you want to ask all your friends for advice all at once--without bothering them--it's killer. Delver uses your implicit social network, which is much smarter than requiring users to specify in advance who their friends are. Read: Damn clever: Delver makes search social.

Ribbit makes a voice platform, aka Web telephony. It's a powerful technology that will allow developers to do cool things with voice services, without dealing with traditional telephone switches and cantankerous phone companies. There's a Salesforce application already. At Demo, the company showed off its own homegrown consumer application, Amphibian, a useful application that melds your mobile phone with your Web presence. Amphibian does new stuff like pull up the social network profile pages of people when they call you. Creepy. But cool. Read: Ribbit hops into Web telephony. See also, Toktumi, a business VoIP product I like a lot.

Jodange Top of Mind is a tool by quants, for traders. It looks at the published opinions and prognostications of market analysts and correlates them with stock moves. From that data it tells you which writers are the ones that either predict or influence the public markets. Why I like it: Because it's a real business. Access to this service costs $10,000 to $15,000 a month for a small workgroup, and people in the financial business will pay it if the data bears out. The company will also release simplified widget versions of its data that consumers can put on their Web start pages.

If you're interested in predicting your own financial outcome, also see Voyant At Home (Read: Voyant tells you when you can't retire.)

Green Plug. This is an initiative to build the universal DC power supply. Key components: Devices tell the supply what voltage they need, and the supply shuts off power to a device when it indicates it's fully charged. It's greener that traditional power supplies and could be a lot more convenient for consumers as well. It's a small step toward a revolution in power delivery for electronic devices, and the revolution is long overdue. Read: Demo goes green.