Google announced last week at the Web 2.0 summit that it was working on a social search feature, but also stated that it will be weeks before it went public. Social search taps into your social networks profiles and then displays relevant links and status updates from all your friends across your social profiles have shared and then displays them at the bottom of the search page. Google states that, Social Search will improve your search results on Google by providing you with personal relevant search results.

In order for you to start using Social Search you first have to go to Google Labs experimental section and then activate the Social Search Feature. Social Search will only be available in US and English for now.

From what networks?

Social Search will tap into three different sources, so you will need at least one of these accounts to make Social Search work, I would say at least Google profile would be best, if you don’t have one go make one here.

Social Search uses your Gmail’s contacts that you have created with your friends and coworkers for email and chatting with Google Talk. Social Search also uses your Google Reader subscriptions and all the social networking profiles that you have linked into your Google Profile.

Now you don’t need a Google Profile, this is the place with all your social networking profiles for Social Search to gather information from friends. Based on the information you give in your Google Profile, Google can now auto-detect all of your social networking profiles and your friends connected to services like Facebook, Flikr, FriendFeed, YouTube, Reddit, Digg, BrightKite, and  so many others.

How it Works.

Once you have activated Social Search, It’s results will appear at the bottom of your stand search results page and will be clearly labeled as “results from people in your social circle.” Goggles search evangelist Matt Cutts pointed out is that it is important to note that not every search will trigger the Social Search results. Now when it does, the  search results should be highly relevant to your search query .

You may also manually trigger Social Search from your search options panel while you are logged in. There, Google will now present a list of all your friends that it thinks that are closely relevant to the key phrases you were searching for.  By clicking on a name you can restrict your results even further and see results from just one person or two people.

More and more companies are starting to realize that the content they offer on their site will not match up to the social media sites out there, where the community contributes to the content.

Several, on the other hand, have gone to great lengths like candy company Skittles, which redesigned their entire homepage with Twitter’s search stream. The only thing remaining on the homepage is a little navigational console in the upper left hand side of the page, which right now is taking up some room in the Twitter stream, but instead of them talking about how great Skittles are, it now is regular consumers talking about Skittles. I love this idea I think its great PR for the company.

Now this approach is not common in any way when it comes corporate websites, it has already been done other places. Lots of musicians are considering MySpace to be more important than their official website, and promoting their music, new, events and other good stuff there rather than their site. I look forward to seeing more corporations using more social channels but I don’t think we will anytime soon.

Twellow is expanding into different areas of Twitters functions. Today a new feature was announced/launched, which makes it easier to search among your followers and friends.

With the launch of Twellow’s new followers and friends features, now you can look at your current social graph of tweeple that you are tracking via the familiar Twellow profile lists.

Being able to search within your followers and the tweeple you follow should make it better and easier for all Twitter users. Twellow also started integrating new tabs for the recently added features. Now from any page on Twellow you can easily go to them on any page.

Google has finally decided to open a Twitter account. It is attached to a random googler and the bio states “news and updates form Google”.

The first tweet was created around 7pm EST last night, and Google already has 24,149 followers. They are following 58 other people mostly fellow Googlers, and Googles products. Biz stone, Evan Williams, Pete Cashmore.

The Google Twitter account was long overdue, but well liked as the number of followers shows you. First of all, this enables Google to have yet another outlet for distributing updates about the company.

The list of follower is a good way to find other Googlers to follow like Matt Cutts @mattcutts. The Google product accounts like Google Reader are not just throwing links to their blog posts either. For every one that want to keep up with every Google detail, this is the account to follow.

Tonight: Ning will be introducing some new chat functions, giving Ning administrators the ability to integrate a rich chat environment for their users. Ning’s new chat system is flash-based, allowing users to have a chat bar along the bottom of the screen. Users have the ability to chat through an interface at the bottom of the screen, or can pop-out their chats into a new windows. Although the interface will remain consistant through out each netowork, users are not able to chat with users out side of the current network they are on.

Putting Ning’s growth in chat aside, Ning has been posting really impressive stats recently, they have grown to 4.8 million uniques in january ( 368% growth year over year) even though they recenty banned pornography networks, and we all know porn used to be the most sought out thing online, until recently when social networks passed it up!

The new version is available in limited Beta, but will come out to the general public in the next several weeks. Once it comes out, expect a lot more sharing going on. CEO Tim Schigel says “we see that sharing frequency increases 5 times when users leverage tools like ShareThis with access to their contacts and friends”

ShareThis is featured in tens of thousand of sites including NFL, MTV, TechCrunch, Wired, and many many more. You can see the new version in action now on the beta sites including: Boston.com, Elle.com, and FoxNews.com

New Features in the beta version include:

* ShareBox v.2.0- Users can now save the content rite to their ShareBox through the link within the widget, allowing for easier access to the content you shared previously.

*Contact Manager- Now users are able to import email addresses and contact names right through the widget from most of the major webmail providers with the ShareThis new contact manager, making it easer for you to share with all your contacts without ever leaving the site where you are getting the content.

*Better Design- ShareThis is completely redesigned to be tab free.

*Widget Gets Smarter- It will automatically display the last 3 email addresses you used, making it faster and easier to share content with friends and family