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Srikant JakilinkiTwitter cofounders have talked about the importance of discovery in interviews and at conferences over the last several months. This week a new design for Twitter.com went live featuring top tweets and a search box to find more of what you want, but Twitter and many other web companies could improve discovery much more by incorporating other players’ data.
Also, a year and a half ago, Google vice president Marissa Mayer said that social search is part of the future of search. Now, the question is what data can help make social search and discovery advance faster.
Think about the data that represents everything you do online, including web visits, searches, ads clicked, purchases, time spent, location, etc. Web products like the Google browser toolbar return data to Google about the websites you visit. Browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer can get even more data about what you do. For this piece, I’m referring to all this toolbar, browser, search and email data as “toolbar data” for short.
What you typically discover on Twitter and Facebook is limited to your connections and what you search. More, better data is needed to learn about what you’re missing. You might have a lot of interests – sports, music, technology, books, movies, TV, food, travel, etc. – and things happen around you and around the web related to them that you probably want to know about. Surprise concert by your favorite band tomorrow night? New travel website? Cutting edge phone being released? We don’t even know how much we’re missing until we see it.
With more data, developers could build services or apps with toolbar data to see what’s hot now, this week, month or year for any thing broken down by age, location and more. One app might focus on the most popular content about travel to Asia based on unique visitors to specific web pages and the number of links shared by email or social networks. Another app might cover the most engaging communities online based on growth in time on particular parts of each website compared to -
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About the Google data advantage, someone close to Facebook tells me: “The framework I usually use for a discussion like this is ‘explicit’ vs. ‘implicit.’ One real danger here is that a lot of the data you will get from implicit browsing is searching and looking without success. While you can help narrow and get a sense of someone’s interests, you can’t necessarily predict the next best matches. The reason that Tweets/Facebook (and even PageRank) are interesting is that they try to actually take an explicit affirmative action such as a share or hyperlink and create useful data and relationships on top of the core data – and especially from real people such as your friends or influencers.”
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Lawrence LiuTwitter cofounders have talked about the importance of discovery in interviews and at conferences over the last several months. This week a new design for Twitter.com went live featuring top tweets and a search box to find more of what you want, but Twitter and many other web companies could improve discovery much more by incorporating other players’ data.
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