The real Buzz is in the Rise of Social Algorithms

Practice is starting to look like theory. When Social Networking started, it was clear that people would use it to find things that way as well as using search engines. Its just that the volumes were small and Social Networks, by and large, had crap comms to share things by. Twitter changed all that, and now Facebook - having implemented far better and simpler comms - is finding the same:

According to Web measurement firm Compete Inc., Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites.

For what its worth this blog has had more referrals from Twitter than Google for some time, which has made us far less impressed with all the arcania of Google SEO).

But now that its happening in scale, it puts Google's model under pressure as it is simply cruder for Advertising:

David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy for the digital marketing firm 360i of New York, said the importance of search engines isn't going away.

"But there's always been one downside to search," he said. "Consumers only spend about 5 percent of their time online searching and the other 95 percent of the time at the destination. Social media is quickly accounting for a large percentage of that 95 percent. Google's biggest acquisitions, DoubleClick and YouTube, have been all about playing a big role in the rest of consumers' Web usage."

But Social search just isn't scalable without the Signal to Noise ratio getting unmanageable - so we expect to see a whole raft of Social Algorithms emerge to help automate, speed up and filter the process. How do we know this - because we, and a whole lot of other people we know, are fiddling with them, and they show a lot of early promise.

Steve Rubel hypothesized Buzz was launched half baked and half cocked to get out there before Facebook launched its FBMail service, and that may be so - but to our mind the real Buzz is in the algorithms dealing with the blend of social graph and social data.