The Importance of Discovery

I wrote a post a few months ago in the heat of the Facebook vanity URL debate. In it, I argue that while owning your name space is important, the name itself is negligible - the links between your names are what matter:

Your identity online, in your own space, can be Jake Levine, Jakel25, Jakerlevine, levine.jake, or whatever pseudonym you wish to go by. Many will be forced to settle for almost-names (or will choose to). Or, god forbid, you may choose to forgo owning a domain name altogether!! Whether your owned namespace is chrismessina.com, facebook.com/chrismessina or factoryjoe.com, what is important is that search and discovery recognizes that facebook.com/chrismessina==factoryjoe.com==the Chris Messina I am looking for.

I thought it relevant to include this in light of Google’s recent announcement of a new service called Social Search. Danny Sullivan has done a great job explaining the service.

It is easy to see the value in Google’s social search offering. When searching for information about the new Google Social Search product, for example, I am far more likely to attribute value to a link provided from my friend Alex (who works at Google) than to a link generated by a generic Google search.

Now imagine if social search were implemented on a larger scale. Imagine if Google could pull in my contacts from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Last.fm. Perhaps a LinkedIn connection who works at Morgan Stanley has linked to an article on Twitter about the economy. Might that article have greater potential value to me than a quick search on WSJ.com?

(Unfortunately for this example, LinkedIn does not allow access to contacts data, so I would have no way of seeing this article unless I am also friends with this person on Twitter.)

I’m very happy to see Google get into this game. We all recognize that it is important to maintain an online identity above and apart from the proprietary services that make up the social web, but the fact is that while we nerds of identity might go waaaaay out of our way to make the connections between our online identities all too clear, the majority of social web users just don’t care to go through the trouble. And now, they don’t need to.

Making clear the connections between our siloed identities is the first step towards realizing a truly user centric social web. Here’s to hoping we can repeat history -