I seem to be the only one who thinks that Robert Scoble is onto something when he talks about how business search could be so much better through the melding of services like Mahalo, Facebook and Techmeme. It seems he’s stirred up a hornet’s nest among the search engine optimization crowd. They miss the point altogether and seem far more intent on defending their position than looking to see where Robert’s argument holds merit. That’s the blogosphere for you.
I spoke to Robert about this in the context of what matters to business people. He agrees these services are not ripe for prime time business use. He also agrees that humans don’t scale – the premise upon which Mahalo’s human built directory operates. But neither of these things are the point either.
What matters is that someone is out there thinking about how search can be weaved into the fabric of emerging social networks. This is exactly the way services should be developed for business because, like any other relationship, we reach out to the people we trust. If they’re creating content that might be useful we’ll search their stuff first. Won’t we?
For a more detailed consideration of this topic, check what I said here.
