www.nickhodge.com

From Glenn Derene, wir­ing at Pop­u­lar Mech­an­ics in “How Social Net­work­ing Could Kill Web Search as We Know It”

… with the rise of social net­work­ing sites such as Face­book, MySpace, Twit­ter, Second Life, LinkedIn and even Google’s own Orkut, the next gen­er­a­tion of Web users may find what they want by using their social net­work rather than a search algorithm. After all, the people in your online social net­work should know you bet­ter than a math­em­at­ical equa­tion, right?

I find this art­icle res­on­ates. The concept that a math­em­at­ical for­mula can replace the col­lect­ive know­ledge of trus­ted friends always seems weird, and the abso­lute inno­cent dork­i­ness that “algorithms solve all prob­lems” as naive.

Being able to ask your twitter-hive mind friends a ques­tion, say about Word­Press themes (see: http://www.nickhodge.com/blog/archives/2508) and receive an intel­li­gent set of answers is way more power­ful than blind search engine bingo.

The power of the inter­net comes from its abil­ity to very cheaply con­nect like minded people into loosely coupled com­munit­ies unboun­ded by space and time.