The slow rise of social search

There been quite a bit of talks recently around social search growing fast, led by Myspace and Facebook.

As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, online marketing is dominating advertising with a healthy 20% growth, despite the economic turmoil.

Interestingly, simple advertising remains the preferred way, the low hanging fruit as opposed to complexly designed ads.

It also seems that Facebook is under exploiting their search monetization. Even though Myspace has tried to crack the space with their Google deal, it is believed to be under performing as per Google.

So when will the large social networks start leveraging their social graph to deliver better search? This remains a highly complex field to be able to calculate taste neighboors and apply them to do better search result or recommendation. Who will be the first?