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Google’s Marissa Mayer talked with the Telegraph recently about her vision for Google’s future—and not surprisingly, she has an expansive vision for what information Google should index and provide to us. An “omnivorous” Google, she calls it. Somehow, I don’t think it’s entirely accidental that she sees a Google that eats everything (rather than, say, knows everything [omniscient], considering the interpretation is apparently “one which is able to take a user’s total context – where they are, what they were just reading, which direction their mobile phone is pointed and so on”). One of the most important sources she wants to tap for better search results is social networks—and while they have already made deals with Twitter for up-to-the-minute results, she wants something a whole lot more “personalized.” Mayer thinks the key will be when Google can include people’s friends’ personal updates from social networks such as Facebook in search and serve these results personally to the correct people. Right now Google can only include the updates and information from these networks if the users’ privacy settings are ‘public’. According to Mayer – the ideal will be to get access to your friend’s updates in search: “Understanding the social network structure and the permission rules around social networks status updates when they are not public – will really empower us in terms of search.” That means digging behind (under?) the walls of privacy that social networks like Facebook have set up to mine your friends’ data (including status updates and events, most likely) and serve those up for what they think are your relevant searches. I don’t know about you, but when I google [a doll's house], I’m not looking for my friend’s status updates on the gift he’s building for his daughters. If Google wants to help us find and organize information, status updates probably aren’t a good way to do it. (The Ibsen play. I’m looking for the Ibsen play.) Interestingly, Facebook is pushing a new privacy system these days—and the default settings are set to “Everyone” for several options (easy to change, of course, but the push is still there). All right, all right, I know I’m apparently the only person on Earth who doesn’t want to see every single friends’ crazy dream status updates when googling [dream interpretation], but will you be giving Google access to your social networks?

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Google Wants Access to Your Private Social Networks

That’s right—Twitter is integrating more with yet another popular search engine. Yeah, it wasn’t enough to promise quasi-real-time results from Twitter in Google results, now Google has convinced Twitter to join Friend Connect . Now your Twitter login will work on any Google Friend Connect site. It’s been a year since Twitter joined Friend Connect , but that initial membership meant only that site followers could use their Twitter profiles and avatars on GFC sites they joined. Now, however, the integration is more complete, integrating Twitter into websites more fully. For site owners, the integration works both ways—you can promote your site easily on Twitter and your Twitter profile on your site and among your Friend Connect Followers. You can invite your Twitter followers to visit and join your site, and you can invite your Friend Connect Followers to follow you on Twitter. Friend Connect Followers can also promote your site on Twitter, either posts, pages or comments on the site—and those tweets are broadcast to your followers, too. Perhaps best of all, if you’re already using Google Friend Connect, you don’t have to do anything to enable the new Twitter features—as Google says in their explanatory video , “It just works.” Overall, it does seem like an easy way to integrate Twitter into your site and make sure your tweeting users can participate and integrate that into the discussion. That alone is a pretty attractive feature. What do you think? Would you add Google Friend Connect for the Twitter integration? How do you integrate Twitter into your site or blog?

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Twitter Integrates into Google Friend Connect

Google Friend Connect can help convert any site into a Google-supported social network. In addition to allowing members of your site to send each other private messages, now Google is bringing its personalization home to your site with Friend Connect . The shared interests that draw people to your site can make it easier for you as a site owner to appeal to them—but not just through your website. Google Friend Connect adds new capabilities for webmasters to communicate with their users in personalized ways, specifically with: Send custom newsletters : The new “Newsletter” section of your account lets you create, send and manage newsletters. And with the help of “Interests,” you can either send out newsletters to all your subscribers, or send out custom newsletters to different segments of your subscribers, based on the interest responses they submit. Personalized content gadget : This new Friend Connect gadget automatically presents a dynamic personalized set of links to your site’s content that matches each visitor’s specific interests. Is a visitor learning how to play swing music? Links to articles your site has published about playing swing are presented to him or her. Google is also adding AdSense units to Friend Connect if you’d like to display those on your site. As always, for the visual learners among us, Google made a video: Google has long been rolling out more and more personalization throughout its services. Two of the most recent changes have come in Google Reader, with social- and usage-history based suggestions , and Social Search, now available in labs . And the roll out has been so slow that many of us have complacently followed along. Will there be a point at which we decide enough personalization, we need more privacy? Or is it too late to change our minds?

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Google Friend Connect Gets Personal

By Alok Saboo – Follow @truvoip Twitter is a great platform bringing together millions of people for you to interact. The challenge, however, is to identify the subset of this twitterverse that is relevant for you. The value that you can derive from Twitter is a function of the quality of people that you interact with. Today, I will present a great tool – Tweepi – that makes the onerous task of finding and following quality people a cakewalk. Tweepi presents a geekier, faster way to manage your Twitter experience. It currently has four tools and hopefully we will more in the future. Geeky Follow: Before you can prune your friend list, you need to build your friend list. Geeky Follow enables you to follow active tweeples who share the same interests are you. Just identify popular tweeple in your domain and selectively add people that are following them. The underlying idea is simple, people following users that you idolize share similar interests as yours. For example, if you are interested in technology related tweeps, you may want to follow users following @mashable or @techcrunch. After you enter the popular user, Tweepi will provide the list of users following the popular tweep and also provide various statistic about them, such as location, number of followers, tweets, replies, RTs, etc. Using all this information, you can then selectively follow the users that match your criteria. Ideally, you want to select tweeps who have been retweeted often and who also actively engage with others. Flush: While Twitter encourages interaction, you may find several users following you back. Depending on your requirement, you may want to unfollow users that do not reciprocate your friendship (indicating that they do not value your opinion). Tweepi provides a simple tool to unfollow users that are not following you back. Once again, Tweepi will provide all the stats about these users to help you make an informed decision about whom to unfollow. Geeky Reciprocate : Reciprocate does the opposite of Flush.  Reciprocate provides you a list of tweeps that are following you, but you are not following them. Again, based on the statistics that Tweepi provides, you may or may not decide to follow back your followers. Cleanup: Over a period of time, you may find that you have lot of friends, but they are not tweeting enough (e.g., left twitter) or spamming (the biggest complaint on twitter). Cleanup provides you some help to prune down your friend list to eliminate dormant or spammy users so that you continue to have a good experience with twitter. The best part of Tweepi is that it provides you with all the information you need to make a decision, but you are the ultimate judge. Tweepi even provides preset rules that you can use to make your search more effective, e.g., you can sort on the basis of followers to following ratio. Overall, it is a great tool to make enrich your Twitter experience and I would strongly recommend everyone to give it a try! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Tweepi – Twitter Follow Management With Stats Related posts: Did @PhilBaumann Just Save Follow Friday? Follow Friday Soup To Follow or Not to Follow; that is the Question

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Tweepi – Twitter Follow Management With Stats

There are two brass rings in search these days: real time and social. Google (and Bing ) have been working on the real time thing with Twitter, and last week Google announced they were working on a Social Search option in Labs —and now it’s out . With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page under the heading “Results from people in your social circle for New York.” I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking “Show options” on the results page and clicking “Social.” All of the info in Social Search is publicly available, but they highlight info based on their (massive data collection) information about you from: Google profile contacts Gmail contacts, chats and groups. People you’re following on FriendFeed or Twitter Feeds in your Google Reader Matt Cutts is here to reassure us that this is perfectly okay: Is it just me, or is it suddenly a little alarming how much information Google has about us? I’ve long maintained that my friends, as smart as they are, probably are not the best source for information, though they may be a good source for real-time or opinion-specific searches. What do you think? Are you concerned about how much info Google has about you? Do you want your friends to provide the 1954 Mets’ stats?

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Google Rolling Out Social Search (in Labs)