The Inimitable Tiff

On top of a busy week, the debut of Buzz sent me on a multi-day exploration and adjustment of my social networks and profiles across a variety of sites. Buzz itself—ouroborus, anyone?—brought me Reader links from Brian Oberkirch and a blog post from Anil Dash, both considering the moves within social networking and privacy with thoughtful reflection. As a result, Buzz helped me read a bunch of reactions to Google’s fledgling social feature set. It’s been geeky fun to follow along with positive and negative reviews, using my own profile and content to test the waters.

At some point, I vanity-searched my own name to see how my profile is referenced with various privacy settings. A BETA feature near the bottom of my first page caught my eye. In my particular case, the new area begins with my Google Profile, then a second profile from LinkedIn. Then it features links to a page I haven’t seen before:

http://www.google.com/s2/search/social#socialcircle

Obviously it’ll reflect your own network. But the extent of information—particularly under “paths” for well-linked people—is notable. Both for what it reveals about a network’s extent from other services as well as the potential for network-validated researching. That latter idea is the heart of Buzz’s value to Google, I think: a social, *human* validated data overlay for the web.

More thoughts to come as I keep watch on it.

More details on social search on a Google help page.

(Cross-posted between Tumblr and Buzz.)