Blekko /Likes Facebook Data

There are easier ways to keep an eye on what your Facebook friends like. Social data in search has attracted a lot of interest in the last few years, with both Bing and Google rolling out a number of different products and services. Bing’s deal with Facebook is one of the more obvious ones, as well as adding Facebook shares and likes (not yet available in Australia) to their SERPs, along with Google’s Social Search using blogs, profiles and other content linked to from connected Google profiles, Google Reader subscriptions and other social content from within their properties in their results pages.

Blekko has joined in too with a /like slashtag for users who have linked their Facebook accounts to their Blekko accounts. This slashtag is populated with sites liked by you and your friends on Facebook. Unlike other slashtags, any one /like tag cannot be used by another user, neither can you create an RSS feed from the query. But you can see who in your network has liked each result.

This feature fits Blekko very well. Using your extended network to generate curated lists of sites to search through matches what they are already doing with user created slashtags. In a way, the biggest limitation of this tool is how Facebook structures the social graph. Not everyone you friend on Facebook is interested in the same stuff, has the same level of information literacy or expertise. The lists appearing in the /like slashtag will reflect this.

Ideally you would be able to search sites liked by specific groups of friends. For example, if you wanted information on WordPress themes, limiting a /like search to people you know that work in web development would be very useful. The same would go for any number of other subject areas. Diaspora’s aspects would actually be a better way to organise contacts for this kind of tool.