After Microsoft announced deals last week with Twitter and Facebook to include real-time feeds from both social sites in Bing’s results, Wired published an article “The Future is Social, Not Search, Facebook COO Says.” COO Sheryl Sandberg is quoted at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco: “We believe in the wisdom of friends.”

Interestingly, the example Sandberg gave to support her point came from the world of movies. When trying to decide whether Where the Wild Things Are would be too scary for her children, she posted the question on Facebook and got the answers she was looking for.

Movies are a social product that we consume in a subjective, experiential way – and so a great example of the limits of dry-fact, one-size-fits-all search. (Which by the way seems to me the best solution for some other types of questions, if one that still has plenty of room to improve.)

Rather than social replacing search, I see social entering search as part of a more general trend toward personalization. Incorporating your social circle into your online discovery or decision process is just one aspect of the kind of personalization that’s necessary to help people make sense of all the noise and choice on the web.

Rob Walker’s latest piece in Consumed, “Few Releases,” takes a look at redbox as a business that allies itself with the principle that consumers are overwhelmed by too many options (Paradox of Choice) and appeals in part by offering few. As Walker notes, redbox’s strongest point is spontaneous, rock-bottom-cost rental. But this is strengthened by a limited selection that focuses on recent releases. “You know, I missed that in the theater, why don’t I pick that up?” is how Mitch Lowe, president of redbox, describes the painless, near-instantaneous selection process.

The idea of ignoring everything but recent blockbusters may work for redbox. But it probably doesn’t look like a full solution to the overwhelming choice in movies for anyone who cares about culture, movies, or who has ever seen a blockbuster they disliked or watched a lesser-known movie they enjoyed.

Instead of just limiting the options, better discovery tools - incorporating personal and social elements – can give each person a customized set of options, limited by mood and taste rather than just by what’s popular.

At Jinni, we’ve been intrigued to note that people often describe our search results, which are as yet a one-size-fits-all proposition, as “recommendations.” I think this is because Jinni supports a personal approach that’s unfamiliar for users of standard search engines. You tell Jinni you’re in the mood for something “funny” or “thought-provoking” – and you get answers. This isn’t social, it’s a machine, though it is based on automated Natural Language analysis of many thousands of user reviews. Maybe search as a kind of active recommendation-gathering is the personalized future.

Technorati Tags: redbox, Bing, Facebook, Twitter

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