[akrymski]

The benefit of this approach is that it's an addition to PageRank, not a replacement. You don't need massive adoption of the social part I think cause you can link to eg HN, which already links to other sites. It's simply extending the backlinking concept to add personal pages.

Most long tail queries work well enough with Google and indeed most of the benefit of this approach would be in the head where ranking matters more. Furthermore nothing prohibits users from liking domains, not just individual URLs.