| > What matters is what others with similar tastes like. Yes. Exactly. And it depends. Some friends have very different tastes than I - and sometimes that's exactly why they are my friends (who wants homogenous friends?). For some items, I want to know what others with similar tastes like - like restaurants, for instance. A friend of mine loves fried food; me, not so much. But a stranger who likes healthy food may know of an unpopular restaurant none of my friends know of. That is exactly the kind of restaurant I would want surfaced in a good social search for restaurants. For news articles, I would want the opposite. I don't necessarily want people with similar tastes to recommend articles to me. I'd rather read conflicting views across the gamut of the argument, so I can make my own (hopefully) informed decision. Again, friends aren't as good a source of such articles as strangers would be. And to make it more complicated, that's just my preference. Someone else might prefer people with similar tastes instead. I definitely agree that the context informed by the relationships is the key to social search - sometimes it's someone similar to you, other times, it's not. |