[bokardo]

Hey folks, thanks for the feedback. The reason why I titled the piece "slow erosion" is that this will take years...I know how valuable Google is for fact-based searches. But slowly, social search and in-context advertising will gain, not because Google will get worse, but because people will be starting from a different place. They'll start on Twitter or Facebook.

The key insight is that people trust others for certain types of information such as recommendations. A single recommendation from a friend is much more powerful than a list of restaurants Google will give you. "Hey, I know you and I know you will like this restaurant". You could argue that Google will eventually know a lot about us (they do already), but the fact is that social interaction trumps reference material in a lot of cases.

So this will probably take years, and many of the arguments against are that right now Google is better. No denying that...but have you seen the ads on Facebook lately? They're pretty stinky, but twice as good as they were even months ago.