To me, it seems like one of the biggest hurdles for most people in terms of social search or networking tools is the cost of building up their networks, so this would provide a quick and easy way around that.

from The Rise of GoogVark

Hmm. Really? Aardvark already had Facebook Connect and Gmail contact importing. Is clicking one button and maybe typing your password too much for most people?

If so then XFN and things like the Google Social Graph API are the way to go.

I think a bigger hurdle for companies trying to get into the search game is the extra cognitive effort it takes people to decide if they want to do a Google search or an Aardvark Search (or hey, a MrTaggy search). One assumes the acquisition will at least address that issue for Aardvark. We still don’t have a good answer for companies that don’t get acquired by Google though.

PS: look at that, I’m blogging again!

In fact Writely’s right-click is hilarious. If I click ‘copy’ or ‘cut’ or ‘paste’ in their menu i get an error popup saying “We don’t have access to your clipboard from javascript so you can’t use these commands from our very pretty right-click menu”. But if you hadn’t messed with my right-click menu in the first place, it would work just fine!