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I spent the past two days at the Gilbane 2008 conference in Boston, and while I came away with some good information and had some good conversations with people, these conferences remind me how frustrated I get when people talk and talk and talk instead of demonstrating, showing, and using specific examples. I heard too many people say “well, that’s what young people are doing on Facebook,” when I would have found it much more useful if they’d opened up a browser and shown me real content, real people, real applications and real usage patterns.

Better yet, just make the whole thing a BarCamp.

But for all the talk in the sessions about the importance of Social Media, I’m curious why more sites aren’t doing mashups that integrate general web search results with search results from your own social network. Someone should build an OpenSocial container with a Google search bar in it, and in the results you could include recent status updates from your friends that include similar search terms.

Here’s an example. At the conference, FatWire was presenting a demo of its software during a keynote and thought it would be funny if they used “sanitized” images from Playboy. The audience was not amused and promptly let them know about it.

So how does this incident show up in search results? Below are some dynamic AJAX results comparing Google News and Google Blog search results for “gilbane fatwire” with the exact same search results from Twitter. I’m sure these results will change over time, but for now it’s a concrete example of how integrated search results can help you connect with the right information AND the right people.

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