I guess Danny Sullivan is just angry, because he certainly can’t be surprised that Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis are attention seekers whose rhetoric is explicitly engaged to drive traffic to their sites.

It’s not particularly surprising to me that as people start to really grok some of the implications of social networks they get excited. Really excited. I don’t doubt that Scoble is feeling a bit of real techno-enlightenment… add that to his constant drive for publicity and the result is often to go over the top. Yes, social search is not new. Yes, the revolution some have predicted hasn’t happened in that space.

But I’m bullish on the idea of utilizing one’s social network to drive search. It isn’t a zero-sum game. There’s no reason to abandon (or belittle) search engine development and optimization, since continuing to work with socially influenced search isn’t in competition with traditional techniques. Traditional search will be with us for a long time, and it should be. For the most part it works well enough. And if we’ve learned anything from the past few years of topsy-turvy folksonomizing and mashing-up of small, loosely joined pieces it’s that good enough is often– well– good enough.

But arguing against the value of social search based on past failure may not be that strong of a position. Many technologies “fail” for many years until the technology itself, time, culture, and the Magic 8 Ball of luck are aligned. Socially influenced search in particular is crippled for two reasons, one that will be surmounted in time, one that may not be. The

first problem is that participation in the socially networked space is still incredibly small. Until there is a large footprint, the results will continue to be less than generally useful. That being said, social recommenders and searches which literally take into account one’s social network are already extremely useful in the smaller case. I see no reason that the trend of participation won’t continue and the base from which search can be driven grow continually larger until it becomes relevant for the majority of search and searchers.

The second problem is more difficult: the silo-like nature of the social networks themselves. I agree with Danny that the walls around Facebook will come down and it will become another field for search engines to harvest. But the continued isolation of each network– even those which perform nearly identical functions– hasn’t changed a bit. I’ve been saying for a long time that what the good folks at del.icio.us and furl (and flickr and zoomer, and facebook and myspace) should be doing, in addition to providing the web applications, use their muscle to create a de facto standard for interoperability and portability of data. Opening the data and having an API are only part of the puzzle. The rough portability that having an open API and data create isn’t good enough. The ability to create mashups for particular needs is useful but not generalizable. A federation of data across services would open the door to real social search (given the increased participation noted above).