The article goes into details on each, as is my overall evaluation (briefly: FriendFeed is currently way ahead of Delver, though Delver still has real potential), but I had an incident while I was researching this piece that is noteworthy. I had a research challenge (find a review of a certain Broadway musical review written by Clive Barnes in the late 50s or early/mid 60s for a major New York City newspaper) that had me stumped.

A perfect opportunity to call on my own social network, right? Well the one I turned to, and where in 5 minutes I got several right-on answers, was just an old fashioned ListServ–BUSLIB–a group of experienced business librarians who I’ve been relying on for, oh I don’t know, maybe 15 years or so!

So it was a good reminder that this kind of social search has been around for a long time indeed–and one reason it works so well, IMHO, is that it relies less on algorithms, sentiment detection, rankings, sortings and the like, but just puts dedicated, smart people together. Some like to say that the new social search is human driven and not algorithmic like Google, but it is still primarily a digitally driven process, (crawl the Web to try to determine who is in whose social network, figure out a way which content sharing gets ranked higher etc.), while a good ListServ is still primarily a human-driven process, just facilitated by the Net.

Oh-and one other lesson I learned on the topic of old is still sometimes as good or better than new. One of the business librarians gave me a great suggestion on a source I overlooked to try to find that review: how about the Readers Guide to Periodicals? Of course!

It reminded me of the time I worked at McGraw-Hill in the mid 80s and needed to compose a letter but all the “Wangs” (word processors) were down. I was roaming around wondering what to do until somebody pointed out to a nearby desk and suggested I use the object sitting on it–a typewriter. (Of course, that’s not an option anymore in today’s offices)

Much of the culture of the Net has been built upon a kind of idealism, especially in relation to people offering their time to contribute content at no charge….

I should note that I came across this article today by getting recommended to it by one of the people I “follow” and trust on Twitter: Jason Calacanis. Another example of a type of “social graph search”,and something I will be discussing in some depth in the May issue of The Information Advisor.

On another note regarding whether idealism will and can work on the Net, I am attending a lecture later today by a professor in Media Studies in SUNY Buffalo, Trebor Scholz, who is giving a talk at the New School here in New York City that looks like it will be on a topic I’ve been wondering about recently: the labor implications when Internet users that contribute their time and efforts, at no cost, help firms “co-create” their products on the Net. The title of his talk is

“What the MySpace generation should know about working for free”