Google and Yahoo figured that out early with their e-mail services. People don’t want to have to sift through hundreds of e-mails looking for a particular message when they can just do a keyword search.
Social media is the next frontier for search.
Millions of people are actively using Facebook and Twitter and building up thousands of posts in their message streams. But they can’t search their postings easily on either of those sites.
I recently wanted to show my son some funny videos based on the Angry Birds video game. I had shared links to those videos on my Facebook wall, which I’m using now in place of Digg and separate bookmarking services to save weblinks to interesting sites or articles.
Long story short, I couldn’t find those videos quickly because Facebook lacks a search tool specifically for users’ postings. Same goes with Twitter.
Those services need such a search tool pronto. Its need is going to be more important over time.
I eventually found those Angry Birds-themed videos, but not before sifting through months worth of my posts. Not great. You can see a compilation of those videos at One Stop Video.
Photo: Photoshopped image of a National Geographic cover featuring a red bird from Angry Birds. (See Laughing Squid.)
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