Continuing on looking at the development of social networks along its lifecycle, search is definitely the next thing that changes its very idea. Whether it’s just a manual search (with automated grouping or member-recommended groupings) will depend on the concept models of how each of those social network sites. It’s no question search will be the killer feature for social networking sites.
Check out Digg for search. The new Wink Collections allows you to create a group of interesting links and share them with friends. They added social networking and now support rich media including YouTube. The new share feature is a bit like the one from Facebook.
There is another new feature: a people search engine for Bebo, MySpace and Linkined - that appears under the People tab on the homepage. Wink is doing a complete crawl of these sites, allowing you to find people based on their name, username or interests etc. Wink also lets you bookmark people and add them to your connections. The advanced search is even more powerful, allowing you to search specific areas of a profile page.
Another company Plaxo has created the first Web service to share data between major address and calendar programs. With Plaxo 3.0, as the new service is known, consumers can synchronize address books and calendar data locked up inside Microsoft Outlook or Google etc. This new service is going to compete with other social networks (particualy for business users), which, rather than forming links between computer address books, link people online through their shared media interests--based on what they write or the photos and video they choose to share.
You should also check out a meta-social networking site call Snag. It offers search across LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and Hi5. It also allows you to see your friends from all the networks, see your inboxes, and get status updates on your friends. This is the meta social network search. I can vision a feature that shows which social network one has signed up or actively engaged in. Or create network maps of how one is affiliated with another through a number of networks. This will be a cool and useful feature, especially for business social networking. I will share my slides on the future evolution of social networks once I am done with it.
