RockMelt - Your Browser. Re-imagined. Is Facebook's Social Search Engine a Google Killer?: Tech News and Analysis « When Facebook launched its Open Graph protocol in April, blanketing the web with “like” and “recommend” buttons, it seemed obvious that one of the company’s goals was to use the resulting behavioral data to power a social search engine — one based on likes instead of links.
That process is now well under way, as a report at AllFacebook notes. The company has confirmed that all web pages that use the network’s open graph plugins show up in the social network’s search results in the same way that traditional Facebook pages do, as described by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his keynote at the F8 conference.
The network’s move to harness the power of its Open Graph protocol is clearly a shot across Google’s bow, but it’s not clear whether the power of the “like” is equivalent to or greater than the power of the link. The Race to Build the “Daily Me” Continues: Tech News and Analysis « Ever since the web first started to become mainstream, there have been attempts to build the “Daily Me,” a personalized newspaper that learns what you like or are interested in (does anyone remember PointCast?).
But as I noted in a recent post on the topic, many of these efforts are lackluster at best, and irritating at worst. They either require too much fiddling to tune them, or they don’t show any intelligence at all (or both). But that doesn’t stop companies from trying — and the most promising entrants in this race so far are those that try to build their recommendations on top of the social signals coming from Twitter and other networks.
The latest to join the field is a personalized magazine app for the iPad called Zite, whose name is a play on the German word “zeitgeist,” meaning “the spirit of the times.”