The report has been authored by Tyler Turnbull (Joint Head of Planning) and Damien Le Castrec (Planner).

I have written Facebook but the question is also valid for Twitter, FriendFeed or any other Social Thing. Considering the news, even on the various Mashable and TechCrunch, Social Networks could be a serious menace to obsolete search engines. Are we sure of it?

Certainly, the Social Web has changed many people’s habits and has given a powerful stimulus to diffusion of ideas and informations. The news often spread way earlier on Twitter than on on-line newspapers and it is very easy to organize a march, a protest, a group against something. You only need a few clicks, some friends and there you go. The generic information or political news – often wrong – spreads very quickly amongst all the nodes of a net and if it is able to give rise to indignation or curiosity it can reach millions of contacts. Viral Marketing, for instance, is exactly based on features of uncontrolled diffusion of the news which are innate in the social net.

The very same mechanisms which explain why a generic information can quickly spread on Facebook are the basis why a specific information, the one we need at the moment, cannot always be obtained so easily. After all, the explanation is very intuitive: the more what we are looking for is specific and sectorial, the fewer the chances our friends can help us; everything is more complicated because the average person – Dunbar’s number – has no more than 250 friends on Facebook. With no need to bring up Granovetter’s theory “The Strength of Weak Ties”, it is plain that often, in order to find a job or alternative solutions to a problem, we need to turn to people who are not part of our circle of close friends. The right information is dependent function of the number of friends and their cultural and geographycal heterogeneity: if all of my friends are architects in Rome it will be difficult or very unlikely for me to find a job as a photographer in Milano.

And what if I were looking for infos about a car’s peculiar model? A cheap hotel in London? How many ‘friends’ do I need to have? Thousands? Of course there are the connectors, those supernodes with thousand of friends, followers and contacts who can do you a favour and spread your request but it would be complicated as a permanent activity. Sooner or later you should pay them and it’s not all about coffees or beers.

Here proved the fact that Google is still indispensable when we are looking for specific informations and not generic news. In few clicks we are soon able to check out how to prepare a roast fish with potatoes or how to bake coconuts cookies. How many amongst your Facebook friends could give you in no time a fish recipe?

I seems that Facebook has made a number of upgrades to their comments plugin. One of them – comment voting – is a very important upgrade. Ok I’ve already seen the same comment voting on Quora, but it is a good improvement for me and I like it.