Media'ZBiz!

Google Social Search is an experimental feature that helps you find relevant public web content from people in your social circle, when you’re signed in to your Google Account. For example, imagine searching for pictures of St Tropez in France and getting a set of photos from your best friend from last summer. It just means more.

Social search, demoed at the Web 2.0 Summit by Google’s VP of Search Marissa Mayer, combines results from your friend’s blogs, Flickr (Flickr), Twitter (Twitter), FriendFeed (FriendFeed), and a wide variety of other social media sites (so long as your friends have connected their social accounts to their Google (Google) profiles) with Google’s regular search results. The feature will go live this afternoon, and can be found within Google Labs.

Here’s a demo of social search from Google:

The social revolution for search is launched. After Microsoft’s Bing announcing last week its search deals with both Twitter and Facebook, Google fired back immediately annoucing its own deal with Twitter and this new ‘Social Search’ feature, on which they seem betting on it in a big way.

Real-time and hyperlocal search are the new battle fronts for search companies, who are trying to make results more personalised and relevant for users.

An additional video is as well available here.

As many of us, more and more we are relying on Twitter as our source of news and article links. A new site, The Twitter Times had the idea of filtering all those news and links from tweets of the many people you’re following and have put them in an easy-to-digest newspaper-style form. Watch their video. Their service is currently in beta.

Basically, The Twitter Times looks at all the people you follow on Twitter, finds their tweets with links in them, and creates a custom newspaper for you based on those links. But it’s not just a straight stream of stories based on how recent they are, instead the service looks at how many people have linked to the article, both in your social circle and outside of it.

While some have valued lately Twitter to $10 billion dollars, a number of other recent reports also suggest:

-       that number of continental European users are certainly growing but have not yet reached the million users.

In France, a recent poll shows Twitter with only 28% of awareness level when compared to 93% for Facebook.

(Source IFOP France - poll executed June 2009)

The number of French Twitter users could be as high as 100,000 at end of June.

In Germany a recent research shows a quick growth in number of users reaching the 150,000 level last July.

-        that teens are one demographic that just doesn’t seem to be embracing Twitter (like the rest of us).

In a recent TechCrunch post written by guest Geoff Cook, cofounder and CEO of social networking site myYearbook, he highlights the top reasons why Twitter is not more popular among teens:

• Teens already update their status religiously on other sites like Facebook, MySpace, and myYearbook.
• Teens use MySpace to keep up with musicians and celebrities, which MySpace differentiates on.
• As a group, teens are not major consumers of news from any outlet, making “staying current” a poor driver of mainstream adoption — though of course there are exceptions.
• Teens use both MySpace and Facebook to keep up with friends they know.

Given the above, it is no surprise that teen penetration is not higher. The value proposition of Twitter to the majority of teens is the issue.

-        that FaceFacebook enhances your intelligence but Twitter takes it away as very recently claimed by psychologist Dr. Tracey Alloway, from the University of Stirling in Scotland.

Now, regardless of how Twitter could be valued today or tomorrow and whether millions of people would have lost some or all of their brain cells, one thing is for sure: the number of active users in Europe are growing very fast.

We are seeing as well new innovative services built around Twitter like the recently launched Twitemploi, in France a micro-blogging job twitter service. Post an offer on Twitemploi and it will appear on the site, at the @twitemploi account and/or or your Twitter account with hastag #emploi.

If Tweets are surely limited to 140 characters, the number of new services developed around Twitter are surely unlimited.

Apple’s Apps Store is a huge success. Will Twitter Apps follow the same path?