I touched it but didn't say it. A perfect complementary train of thought here Steven. Great post! It will be so interesting to see developments in this direction. Really hard to accomplish, but someone will try and have a go at it. What makes it especially hard in my mind is that PageRank s just that, a rank for pages. You can write clean algorithms that. A social media rank needs to take human behavior into account and that makes it more difficult. It is not just the "like" in Friendfeed or the digg of some piece of content. It needs to capture the fragmented conversation that arise around persons or content. The interaction. Sounds like a pretty interesting ranking challenge ;-)
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
I agree with you Alexander - it would be a hellva challenge to pull off successfully but if someone does it could change a few things on the web.
Bob Thomson
· 1 year ago
Interesting article and good point. The power is in the hands of the people. The internet, namely web 2.0, has become a great vessel and medium for user feedback. User feedback is them most powerful form of feedback because it's coming directly from the consumers. Simple tools such as rating systems, where you pick 1 stars, 2 stars, etc. to rate a blog is something that is extremely valuable. Some sort of user-feedback driven rating system will ultimately overtake a Google page rank type of system.... innovation leads to big money... www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
Bob,
I didn't really take into account things like "voting" per se. What I was thinking of was other things like the tradition link counting (that Google does) and the untraditional things like *Name* count etc. There is enough information already flowing through all the different social media pipes that being able to form some sort of ranking out of it should be possible
Gabe
· 1 year ago
While a social media ranking based on user voting, attention, etc, could certainly play a part in search ranking in the future, I don't think it will "overtake" the tradition page ranking method.
People are much more inclined to share and vote on certain types of content over others. If I'm searching for information regarding a medical condition pagerank may give me better results than social ranking because this may not be something people care to share and vote on. Social ranking will certainly play an increasingly larger role, but you will need to acknowledge certain limits of social ranking.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
Gabe,
As I said to Bob I wasn't really thinking of the whole "voting" senerio when working through this idea but rather on the stuff that is already available flowing through social media. Users will indicate far better what is of interest by the fact of linking to it or talking about a person or idea or post. That for me would be more important that a "voting" scheme
q
· 1 year ago
"Users will indicate far better what is of interest by the fact of linking to it"
But this is exactly what PageRank does. Probably in the future Google will add some features you mentioned to PageRank. I think that it would be a evolution not a revolution.
brandonzeman
· 1 year ago
Great post! Would be very beneficial to have this service across all social media areas, and not just site specific- like Summize for Twitter.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
thanks Brandon and most definitely this couldn't be site or service specific - it would have to take them all into account.
Peter Rich
· 1 year ago
Social rank assumes that what the 'popular' masses deem important is what I am looking for, which it often is not. It also only indicates one aspect of human behavior. It is also a system, like Pagerank, that can be duped fairly easily--lots of friends ganging up on certain cites, etc. As some have mentioned, a more complex system of analyzing human behavior would be more beneficial. For example, let's couple the social aspect of the site with data about how that site is used. How long does each visitor stay at that site? Do they stay longer if referred from other sites? I know this is taboo (but being explored), but how long do they spend at a particular site in relation to the sites in their history? Integrating such factors as these might make searching the internet for related sites much more meaningful to my personal circumstances and history. While the social aspect is important, the computer could help direct like-behaving people to similiar sites.
Steven
· 1 year ago
What's the difference? PageRank can easily accomodate this into their new special sauce. Besides, friends sharing a link with friends, already increases pagerank, as long as that shared link is crawlable. Another one-off utility idea that has no monetization strategy.
Markus
· 1 year ago
I think the difference is the timeliness of such a social media index which will be updated in seconds and not in days, weeks or months like the pagerank.
vacation
· 1 year ago
this is a pretty interesting concept.
Markus
· 1 year ago
I totally agree with your idea of a social media index
Ling
· 1 year ago
Interesting. Social media is simply a way of letting the people decide which page is more important. They're already doing that. Why would you need to add one more layer on top of that?
photogold
· 1 year ago
obviously , if people like something like a website or a product then it becomes popular. The question is how good the website/product is . People's tastes vary. Why should I rely on other people to tell me what is good and what isn't unless I know and trust them ? Even at that it is only going to be small number of people
Chris Tew
· 1 year ago
I think you are seriously under-estimating what other factors Google takes into account - it goes way beyond links...
All Comments
I didn't really take into account things like "voting" per se. What I was thinking of was other things like the tradition link counting (that Google does) and the untraditional things like *Name* count etc. There is enough information already flowing through all the different social media pipes that being able to form some sort of ranking out of it should be possible
People are much more inclined to share and vote on certain types of content over others. If I'm searching for information regarding a medical condition pagerank may give me better results than social ranking because this may not be something people care to share and vote on. Social ranking will certainly play an increasingly larger role, but you will need to acknowledge certain limits of social ranking.
As I said to Bob I wasn't really thinking of the whole "voting" senerio when working through this idea but rather on the stuff that is already available flowing through social media. Users will indicate far better what is of interest by the fact of linking to it or talking about a person or idea or post. That for me would be more important that a "voting" scheme
But this is exactly what PageRank does.
Probably in the future Google will add some features you mentioned to PageRank. I think that it would be a evolution not a revolution.
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