John Battelle wrote an interesting blog yesterday about how social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are taking search power away from Google by making it more personal. The argument suggested that online users like to aid their decision making with a human voice, or in other words, an opinion they can trust.
Whilst these sites do provide a greater network of friends you can call upon for advice, I'm not entirely convinced it's the human side that people are necessarily looking for. In my opinion, what an online user seeks is the correct insight, a definite, reliable answer to whatever question they are asking.
Currently, the best way of doing this is to rely on Google's opinion. Very few people leave the first page of search results returned by Google. This is because the first page offers a security; Google rates the first page of results enough to have made it their top 10, and for most that's good enough.
It's establishing those personalized, trusted sources that I think is important to an online explorer. This is why the BBC news service is so popular. The BBC is an iconic public service and breaking news is much more likely to be genuine than if it appeared on a random blog page.
So whilst social networking is certainly changing the way people interact with news and opinion, ultimately it's the source that provides the confidence to make decisions, not the human.
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