Like an entire seeming cohort of lemmings, I've become a Facebook convert. All us late-bloomin' lemmings got excited in part because Facebook very recently opened up its platform through APIs so that it is quite straightforward to write an application which can work within the F8 context. This means that I can track my dopplr friends within Facebook, for example, or keep track of what music they like. It's pretty awesome; it's pretty easy; it builds a very sticky platform.

Tonight over an exquisite dinner with a couple of friends in publishing, interspersed through our musings and speculations on content integration, discoverability, and site functionality, I began to wonder: could we make search work like a platform, like Facebook? If, in other words, we take it as a pragmatic, realistic assertion that Google Scholar, or Google generally, will not expand and liberate its APIs as much as external application service creaters would like, making all of the Google apps fully and wholly mashable, then would Google apps be willing to turn themselves into platforms?

Imagine if Google Scholar took the Facebook approach: then maybe I could tell Scholar that I am an Elsevier Scirus search user, or a Scopus licensee, or a devout user of a future iteration of Zotero, and I want to integrate that functionality into Scholar. I could do research within Scholar, or Daddy Google for that matter, and then pipe the results into an applet of my choice for further analysis. Or alternatively, take some preliminary investigations from a specialized high end database aggregator and pipe them into Scholar for broader query. This functions to some extent like some of the "Web 3.0" search enrichment services that Michael Jensen has so beautifully captured in his article, The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority. There are many other kinds of applications that one could deduce for this metaphor of search.

Like Facebook for example, within Google Book Search, I could subscribe to my friends within my own academic niche, and maybe see what they have been browsing, if they give me permission. Or maybe Harper-Collins has a widget that would permit me to embed page previews within the GBS experience with knobs and levers that I particularly value.

The virtue of the Facebook compromise is that as an individual user, I select my pain quotient, my desserts, my own integration travails. If something doesn't work, I know it is not the fault of Facebook; if something works beautifully, Facebook gets part of the credit for helping make it happen. That's a pretty attractive bargain.

It makes Google (or Microsoft Live!) more sticky, and enriches search for users. In this type of integration, Facebook has shown an interesting path forward.