Dropped by Bradley’s blog today only to discover he was interviewed for the US programme Market Watch in April 2006 about social search!
He touched on points he’ll be expanding on in his keynote talk on ‘The Future Of Web Search’ at the Content 2.0 conference on 6th June.
The interviewer Bambi Francisco - gotta love that name! - said the next chapter of the web will be all about sharing what we find and what we know.
Bradley explained that Yahoo! want to grow sites like Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming and Yahoo Answers...
“in a way that’s organic, so we’ve been letting these properties grow of their own accord”
“If you put up a billboard and drove a lot of traffic toward these sites it would be a bit like inviting people to a party where they walk in and everyone knows the secret handshake except them."
“The right way to come across Flickr is because your cousin Irving put his wedding photos up there and you got an email that said ‘come check them out’. Then you walk into Flickr and you’ve got instant content, instant context and friends and that’s the right way to discover these kinds of sites.”
He outlines a similar model for the gradual gathering of a corpus of knowledge on Yahoo! Answers in its public Beta phase.
Social video search in the pieline?
Bradley also touches on the strong affinities created by these sites and the ways they are - and will be - monetised.
Another telling glimmer of insight comes in his comments on video search where he flags up:
“the DNA of the company and the fact that we have people like [CEO] Terry Semel [and others] who are very deep with Hollywood and very concerned - it bodes very well for our intentions in the video space.”
Content & the network effect
This bore out a point I made recently on the Beers & Innovation blog about Yahoo’s edge over Google in terms of mainstream media content connections.
Finally, he mentions the “network effect” of social search:
“the more of my friends that are brought along for the ride the better it gets for all of us”
So, check out the video – worth registering on the Market Watch site for – and think about coming along to Content 2.0 for a lot more insight and the chance to question Bradley directly in person!
delicious
digg
reddit
technorati
