This talk of 'social search' made me starting thinking about a few other recent pieces of news - firstly Quora going gangbusters - its model of taking an old concept (e.g. Q & A) and applying a whole new 'follow' model is showing the way for a whole slew of disruption this year. The second was that over last 6 months OneRiot and now Collecta have given up on a real-time search. 

Why do I think these are relevant to Googles sudden emphasis on 'social search' - the fact is that you cannot always put two things together and make a product that is more than the sum of its part - in fact you can end up having less of a product. But more often than not what is actually going on is that behind the scenes a whole ecosystem is changing and suddenly your old model very quickly looks dated. 

And this is how I feel we find Google right now - it has immense historic commitment to an old form of finding content - i.e. search, and its response to the changing ecosystem is to take another interesting looking new trend and stick it on top without realising that 'search' is actually being replaced completely. 

Twitter started all of this - the asymmetric follow created a service perfectly adapted to following a defined list of users who interested you. Quora has extended this by giving more granular control by having tier'ed context of 'people' , 'topics' and 'questions'. The fact is we now sit waiting for the interesting things come to us because we have pre-defined our interests and automatically supplied the answers. I think Google does know this - but for now the 'social search' tagline will keep 99% of investors happy that they are adapting.

So the change from Schmidt to Larry for me is all about the need (and quickly!) to have someone drive direction in product because Schmidt did an amazing job of consolidating a model - but now the model is getting stale they realise it's time to do the startup thing and 'pivot'.

Twitter Annotations was for me the most exciting announcement of last year - structured data is everything - and the idea behind annotations was to allow arbitrary data to be attached to each Tweet to allow more exciting applications to be built. 

Currently Twitter is still limited to the kind of use cases that the data associated with a Tweet allows. With Annotations a tweet can contain the meta-data to describe the meaning of the Tweet. 

So for developers what could be built would be limitless - so if you want to build a Quora clone - by having the Tweet as the question with all the topic data stored in the annotation. 

Game developers could build who new social games by storing game status information within each Tweet - so for instance the current positions of pieces on a chess board could be stored in a Tweet. So as you play others could look at the status update and see what move you made. 

I viewed the announcement much in the way when Facebook released its App platform - that for me was one of the pivotal technology changes they made that allowed such growth. 

I hope we see Annotations in 2011

(originally posted in answer to this Quora question)

I stood up in front of a crowd of thousands at the 2008 The Next Web conference and declared that RSS would never make it mainstream. I gave reference to my Dad who used the internet a lot but when I one day asked him what the RSS Icon was he said "no idea, not really noticed it before." 

That reason has now meant that Mozilla is likely to drop the RSS button quoting that only 3% of users every click it. And now we have an angry few reacting to this saying it will be the death of RSS. 

The browser for me is the new operating system - it is a portal to content and nothing more. And as things like HTML5 make web pages more likes fully fledged applications the concept of a having a fixed icon that subscribes to a feed seems almost quaint. 

The reality is that the web has out-evolved consumers RSS and that new forms of content consumption have proved to be more compelling to the mainstream consumer. 

Lastly RSS/ATOM is still very much alive - it is a open format and is the backbone to many new wonderful technologies such as PubSubHubBub, ActivityStreams and much more. I believe it will continue (without consumers knowing) still be powering the pipes behind the scenes.