The term “like” has taken on a whole new meaning since the advent of Facebook, with new concepts subsequently emerging. Enter “social indexing.”
We found this interesting topic on Tech News Daily in their article, “People Rank, Not Page Rank: Social Indexing Makes All Web Browsing Social Networking.” Bret Taylor, Facebook’s chief technology officer, is working to promote this technology. His work is part of a larger move online known as social indexing, which was named a Top 10 emerging technology of 2011 by MIT’s Technology Review.
The “Like” button is just one algorithm that allows content and people to intersect — but social indexing goes beyond Facebook. Masses have been creating content, e.g., making videos, retweeting, editing wiki documents, uploading pictures with tags. The focus now is indexing it so you can find it and use it.
The future may bring a global connection to all that data and result in socially indexing you and finding every intersection between you and someone you know — or don’t know — from anywhere on the web.
This sounds very “chi-like”, but even in a zen paradise you may find concerns about privacy, propriety, and control.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
I’m not thrilled about this. I don’t want all my search to be socially filtered with my retrieval success to be governed by who and how many other people have noticed and like some document with some information. If this is coming, I would hope for an option–a choice to have either social factors or more objective metadata govern retrieval.