Don't Give Up On Google And Social Network Privacy

As social network users, we have all gotten used to accepting less privacy is a necessary evil for social networking sites. When you sign up for new social network service, checking off that terms of use agreement checkbox means that 'yes, I trust you to do the right thing when it comes to sharing my information.' And social networking sites usually take this to mean whatever it makes sense for them. Especially when they are introducing new feature, they would like to interpret it to mean, 'surely you must want to use our new service since you haven't deleted your account'.

Google Social Search: A Man Is Known By The Company He Follows

To all Google fans out there, Google Social Search is now available to all Googlers in US. I didn't realize this until I saw my name popping up on upper right hand corner a few weeks ago. Then last week while I was searching for Amazon EC2 references, I saw the social search in action.

Google Now Makes Full Use Of
My Social Network When Searching; Well Done!

This is a small but significant step for Google. Since I wrote about the lack of social search feature on Google last October, Google has been working hard at improving search experience to include social discovery. If you connect your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Quora and Yelp account, Google will now search the posts made by friends that you have on the social networks and display the search results.

Since I only connected my Twitter account, I saw results from people that I follow. I'm assuming it works the same way with Facebook and LinkedIn (I've just added about half an hour ago, and I haven't seen any results from Facebook and LinkedIn yet).

I'm little excited about this feature and here's why: