Social Networking news and information

While reading a Time story earlier today, I noticed a Sphere It Button at the bottom of the page. If you aren't familiar with Sphere, I did a podcast last year with Tony Conrad, CEO of Sphere while it was still in closed beta.  Of course, you could listen to it or you could just check out Sphere yourself.

The team's aim is to create a blogsearch that returns results that are relevant to the search and as spam-free as is possible.  They've acheived that with Sphere.

As the world woke up to the news that Zarqawi, one of the most wanted terrorists has met his end it's normal to find the blogger community all over it. I got an email from one of our users pointing out a huge gap in the results number for Sphere and Technorati. So I did a comparison. A search on Sphere @ 6:00 am PST yields 700 from the last day (its now up to 2,922 @ 4:20 PST) while a search on Technorati comes up with close to 72,349.

I thought about this during my flight. Can that be right? 70,000 blog posts on an event that happened a few hours ago? Seems like an awfully inflated number. So I spent some time surfing through their results. What does Zarqawi have to do with apartment rentals in Florida? Is anyone really clicking on Zarqawi collectibles from ebay? Gee, I hope not. And results from 2 days ago have nothing to do with what the reader wants in this case - that is one of the reasons we offer date ranges in our search results, it helps you narrow the time range and generally gets you results that are the most up to date with the topic you're interested in tracking.

I'm not sure how many partners Sphere is rolling out this initiative with, but if they've chosen other sites, like Time, that are news oriented but frequented by users who have not already fallen in love with a blogsearch (ie bloggers), they're using a smart strategy.  You and I both know that even when your product is the best, if it's the 4th or 5th entrant, it may not even stand a chance. 

At this point blogsearch is Technorati's to lose, but Sphere should give them a run for their money.  I dare you to do a search and get spam (or irrelevance).  You can get their Firefox extension and their Sphere It bookmarklet here.

Oh, and what is Time thinking only giving you an 'add to My AOL' on their pages.  Time's readers may not be tech savvy, but they're not idiots...  Geesh!