Outsmarting Social Media: Profiting in the Age of Friendship Marketing

3. Social and Contextual Discovery

When I first set out to write this book, I assumed it would cover, among other things, the evolution of search. But as I began piecing together a vision of the way we’ll use the Internet in the future, I realized our habits are changing so substantially that before too long the word “search” won’t even describe what companies like Google and Microsoft (Bing) do. Typing words into a box has become outdated, and websites assume a sort of passivity on behalf of the user, a reward for all the data the user has given to search engines and social media sites in the last decade. Information retrieval is becoming information attraction. Thus, social and contextual discovery have come into being.

Social Discovery

Social ...