Social Search
When someone says "social search", I think of two things. One is the ability to search social sites and media. Two would be search that is coupled with a social aspect.
Greplin deals with the former and allows you to search for things in your online social life. When you put in a search term, it searches your personal accounts including Gmail, Google Apps, Facebook, LinkedIn, Evernote, Dropbox, and Yammer.(It requires registration so that it can get to those accounts.) You can add indexes of your favorite websites and search all your data in one place.
You need to set up an account which is free for 200MB of storage. They offers a premium account with 500MB of storage for $4.99/month and Premium Plus is $14.99/month for even more storage and services. They have an extensive privacy policy page which is a good idea because users are entrusting their account information.
But I think that our traditional search engines like Google and Bing will be adding social search capabilities. Google Plus connected to your email and other Google apps would make that possible to a degree already. Facebook will probably open its search capabilities in the other direction - out from their social world to other places (social or not) that you allow them to connect to.
And I suspect that those big players will add those tools for free in order to get a deeper bite of the data in your social graph for their own marketing purposes.
So, is Greplin a good idea? Yes? Will people be willing to pay for it? Probably not. Unless the competition doesn't offer it - or they convince us that they are a safer keeper of our privacy than the others. Will people be willing to pay for privacy? Maybe.
Greplin deals with the former and allows you to search for things in your online social life. When you put in a search term, it searches your personal accounts including Gmail, Google Apps, Facebook, LinkedIn, Evernote, Dropbox, and Yammer.(It requires registration so that it can get to those accounts.) You can add indexes of your favorite websites and search all your data in one place.
You need to set up an account which is free for 200MB of storage. They offers a premium account with 500MB of storage for $4.99/month and Premium Plus is $14.99/month for even more storage and services. They have an extensive privacy policy page which is a good idea because users are entrusting their account information.
But I think that our traditional search engines like Google and Bing will be adding social search capabilities. Google Plus connected to your email and other Google apps would make that possible to a degree already. Facebook will probably open its search capabilities in the other direction - out from their social world to other places (social or not) that you allow them to connect to.
And I suspect that those big players will add those tools for free in order to get a deeper bite of the data in your social graph for their own marketing purposes.
So, is Greplin a good idea? Yes? Will people be willing to pay for it? Probably not. Unless the competition doesn't offer it - or they convince us that they are a safer keeper of our privacy than the others. Will people be willing to pay for privacy? Maybe.
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