Google SocialCircle

Friday, February 5, 2010

Google SocialCircle

It appears as though Google SocialCircle was first announced in late October, but I’m just using it now for the first time. This page (if you’re logged into Google) should contain your entire social graph along with all the services that everyone in your graph uses. And all this data is now being used in search results to source relevant links written/recommended by your social graph.

This feels quite big to me. First of all, I’m impressed by the accuracy of the social graph data… how did Google know that THIS Andrew Parker (aka Me) and not some other Andrew Parker is the one that is Tweeting at my Twitter account and blogging at Tumblr? And, they managed to tie it back to my Google account… and they did this magic trick for everyone in my SocialCircle.

This level of disambiguation is a hard problem to solve, and while I’m sure they didn’t totally crack this nut, it seems like a remarkable feat for an initial launch.

I bumped into this SocialCircle feature because links from my SocialCircle are now being included in my search results. I was searching for some information on syncing calendars, and at the bottom of the SERP, Eric Friedman’s face popped up next to a post he wrote on the subject. Here’s a screenshot.*

Eric’s post wasn’t a perfect match for my search, but it definitely caught my attention because I will always trust anything that comes from my network more than just a random page.

Some implications of this new feature I predict:

This is a death knell for the *Single Definitive SERP*. Google is going farther and farther towards customer tailoring all search results based on individuals’ data, and SocialCircle is a big step in that inevitable march towards completely personalized SERPs. As a result, the effect on the SEO market will be large.
Businesses’ FB and Twitter accounts are going to start mattering. A LOT. If your business is linked tightly into the social graph, you will appear more often on SERPs. That’s free share of voice and free traffic. Expect a deluge of friend requests from marketers and other entities that are currently spending money on SEO and SEM.
No more scrolling Tweets from random Twitter users in my SERPs. Instead, all social media sources will be heavily weighted by my social graph. If I’m interested in the ski conditions in Tahoe this weekend, I will only see Twitter-sourced results from people within 3 degrees of social graph connection to me. Anything further out than 3 degrees is assumed to be noise because the source is too untrusted for social media.

I look forward to seeing what APIs Google opens up around this SocialCircle feature… this is ripe for mashups.

* Hat tip to Eric for giving me a tour of the ins-and-outs of this new feature Thursday morning.