Faceted search is search where the domain being search is filtered by categories or some taxonomy. Individuals become first class objects in Facebook's new Graph Search and (apparently) search is relative to a node in their social graph that represents the Facebook user, other users they are connected with, and data for connected users. I don't yet have access to Facebook's new Graph Search but I have no reason to doubt that as it evolves both Facebook users and Facebook's customers (i.e., advertisers and other organizations that make money from user data) should be happy with the service. Google's Knowledge Graph and their search in general are also personalized per user. Once again this is made possible by collecting data on users and monetizing by providing this information to their customers (i.e., once more, advertisers, etc.) Pardon a plug for the Evernote service (I am a happy paying customer): Evernote serves as private search. Throw everything relavan...

Neo4j is a high performance graph database that I usually use with the JRuby neo4j gem and sometimes with Clojure ( documentation here ). Neo4j is open source (AGPL v3) and is alternatively available for a reasonable fee with a commercial license (where you don't need to AGPL your project). I took advantage of the free offer to get your first Commercial Basic Server license, even though I am likely to open source my project anyway.

I spent some time experimenting with the Buzz APIs this morning - well documented and simple to use. The firehose data will be useful for tracking public social media posts. I set up Google's example app on my AppEngine account and had fun playing with it. Unfortunately, because of the amount of incoming data, it would only run each day for about 4 or 5 hours before hitting the free resource quota limits. Since this was just for fun, I didn't feel like paying for additional resources.

Interesting news this morning of Google's investment in online games 800 pound gorilla Zynga in order to have access to social graph data from people logging into Google accounts to play games. There has been a lot of buzz about Facebook's effective social graph data and games like those provided by Zynga have helped them. That said, I would still bet on Google having a better chance of making the most money off of social graphs because they get to effectively combine data from at least five sources to build accurate user profiles: statistical NLP analysis of GMail, search terms used by people who are logged in to any Google services, friends and business connections from GMail address books, social connections from Google Buzz (which often includes data from other social graphs like Twitter), and in the near future online multi-player gaming. There is another issue: infrastructure. While I am willing to roughly equate the capabilities for non-realtime analytics of very large...