OUseful Info

Status and Intent: Twoogle

One of the things that I think contributes to the stickiness of Facebook is the way that changes to the status of your "friends" are displayed in your personal newsfeed.

"Status" messages have long been available for instant messaging clients, allowing users to type in particular status messages themselves (as in Facebook) or letting a script update the status message automatically depending on what the user is currently doing.

For example, I use the Adium messaging client on a Mac. When I'm listening to Last.fm I tend to switch on the script that posts details of my recent listening to my IM current status line. Scripts are also available that display the URL of sites you have recently visited in your browser, and so on.

A week or two ago, Twitter was all the rage in status declaring circles, and it too offers a snapshot of your current status (I expect there is a Twitter Xtra for Adium by now that uses your most recent tweet for the IM status. I don't know if the Facebook Twitter application updates your Facebook status?)

Anyway, what came to mind last night was an idea for augmenting search queries with search intent information. When I do a Google search, I'm usually searching for a reason. Google uses all sorts of information from my personal history, etc. to try and optimise my search results. I'm sure some of the secret sauce also tries to identify intent.

So here's a fusion of status updating and personalised search: when I go to my search engine, before I start a search, it asks - "what are you doing?"; the result gets posted as a status message, and is also used to help tune the search:

What are you doing?
Tony is: looking to buy a Nintendo wii

This "statement of intent" status message can then be used to scope the search.

Here's how it could be wired together:

• answer what you're doing;


• the result goes two ways: 1) to your status announcer(s) (Facebook, IM, Twitter, etc); 2) (maybe after some processing) into the search query either: i) as augmenting terms; or ii) as a preliminary search - search queries under this intent then act as "search within results" queries to refine the original statement of intent search;


• you start searching under the current intent.

In effect, the statement of intent seeds the search to produce some intention laden keywords or search facets, which are then added to each of your actual queries - two step intentional searching/explicit intent searching.

Revealing the statement of intent via a public status message also allows members of your public network to feed live personal recommendations into your search results, leveraging online contacts as a potential "live people powered search engine".

Hmm - this could be interesting - after posting a 'statement of intent', aggregating queries designed to satisfy that intention across a social network. We all use slightly different terms to search for the same thing (which is how the "related searches" offers for a particular query are powered), so a posting of a "search intent" status message could also act as a weak request for members of your social network to reply with suggested search terms. These terms are then aggregated to help tune or augment your query. In this case, the social network can support the search by several means:

1. suggesting relevant search terms, which "the algorithm" can use to tune the main user's query;


2. suggesting relveant URLs - which can seed a "related links" factor in the search.

I wonder if the Google T&C allow Google to mine your FOAF network and use their personal search history as weak factors in your own personal search, under the assumption that your friends are likely to have similar interests?

Martin sort of suggested something similar to 'live social network recommendations' in a post on the educational relevance of Facebook earlier today: And the winner is ..... Facebook:

For example, I see that John's status is 'struggling to understand how analogue to digital conversion works.' I see that Davina has added the analogue to digital conversion animation to her learning resources, so I recommend it to John. I look at Davina's learning resources and find a tutorial on Ajax, which I add to my own and I also post on her wall that I have used it. Peter has also posted on her wall, and invites me in to a chat, as he is using it too. And so on.

Tom Heath is also doing something not totally unrelated with Revyu, as told here:

Tom Heath Talks with Talis about Revyu.com and the Semantic Web.

PS Facebook Answers: "Ask questions and get quick answers from your Facebook friends. Answer questions and earn points. See how you rank against other Facebook experts." How long before a combined status update'n'ask app (assuming status updates are accessible via the Facebook API???)(?

Posted by ajh59 at July 9, 2007 12:55 PM