Status Search – Search within Your Friends’ Status Updates
Social networks and social media tools let you find and communicate with people all over the world, even if you’ve never met or known them before. But sometimes, all you really need is the opinion, advice or support of the people closest to us. Status Search answers that need by letting you search your friends’ social status updates.
Recently launched in beta, Status Search is a little private search engine. It connects to your Facebook and Twitter accounts (no need to give away any passwords) and then lets you search the status updates of the people you follow, and also the photos, links and videos of your Facebook friends.
Can’t I just use Google?
If you think about it, many of your quests for information would be better answered, and sometimes can only be answered, by people you know or those who are in your close surroundings. Also, you have much better information about the reliability of these people and it is easier to approach them.
Let’s think of some realistic examples. It’s Saturday morning and you want to go with someone to the sea. Just type in ‘sea’ and you’ll find all the people who’ve written something about it – some are probably about to go there…
What about the new iPhone, should you buy it? Whose opinion would you rather hear, one of your Facebook friends or one from someone you’ve never met? Well, type in ‘iPhone’, and you’ll get a list of people that have related to it, and who would be glad to tell you more about it (see image below).
The list goes on and on, with anything in which your network is better then the whole web: book, vacation, beer, party, job and so on.
Find opinions about iPhone within your network
Can’t FriendFeed do that?
Well, not exactly. FriendFeed is indeed a great social aggregator, but it is more likely that you’ll find there your geeky friends. Status Search will also go through your family, childhood friends and non techie friends. That is – people who do not use FriendFeed to aggregate their feeds.
Advanced features
Much like Twittersheep, Status Search tells you what are the trending topics in your network (except it also includes Facebook). Look at the right side of the screen to see them.
Firefox users can use Status Search without going to the website, by adding it to Firefox Quick Search. Simply login and click ‘add to Firefox Quick Search’ at the lower right corner.
For the following month, you will be able to set up alerts in order to monitor subjects of interest within your network. Add an alert by clicking ‘alerts’ at the lower right corner. The Business model of Status search is built around people paying for alerts, so beginning next month this feature will no longer be free.
Status Search features
More is still to come as the developers say they are working on adding more networks to the service, such as LinkedIn and MySpace.
Have you tried Status search already? Tell us what you think about it in the comments!
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