I’m ignored by ad networks, like Federated Media, I suspect, because of the Myspace-emphasis here. Well, that should change. Now BusinessWeek is suggesting Myspace influence may factor into PageRank:
Google (GOOG) has a patent pending on technology for ranking the most influential people on social networking sites like MySpace (NWS) and Facebook. In a creative twist, Google is applying the same approach to social networks it has used to dominate the online search business.
This may mean adding many influential friends on the most popular social networks will help you rank higher in the search engines. Will Google grant well-connected social networkers authority the same way it granted bloggers authority?
“[Google] search displays Web pages with the highest influence—it makes complete sense for them to extend this to online communities and people,” says Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research
But for this to work, it seems Google needs a way to identify people from network to network. Once that happens, Google becomes something like a credit bureau. Almost like a credit score, now you have a social score. The BusinessWeek article hints at this:
Your score could be compared with that of pretty much anyone in the world.
It seems to me these various Internet scores will eventually factor into credit scores. To give you an idea of how much tracking is going on, set your browser to approve every cookie. You’ll notice most web pages drop multiple cookies, often from multiple domains. Wouldn’t credit bureaus love to have all this information about us, to profile us in more detail?