I question the value of social search in general. It doesn't matter what your friends like. What matters is what others with similar tastes like. The only good thing about social search is the context informed by the relationships.
Yes. Exactly. And it depends. Some friends have very different tastes than I - and sometimes that's exactly why they are my friends (who wants homogenous friends?).
For some items, I want to know what others with similar tastes like - like restaurants, for instance. A friend of mine loves fried food; me, not so much. But a stranger who likes healthy food may know of an unpopular restaurant none of my friends know of. That is exactly the kind of restaurant I would want surfaced in a good social search for restaurants.
For news articles, I would want the opposite. I don't necessarily want people with similar tastes to recommend articles to me. I'd rather read conflicting views across the gamut of the argument, so I can make my own (hopefully) informed decision. Again, friends aren't as good a source of such articles as strangers would be.
And to make it more complicated, that's just my preference. Someone else might prefer people with similar tastes instead.
I definitely agree that the context informed by the relationships is the key to social search - sometimes it's someone similar to you, other times, it's not.
There's been a lot of hype around social recommendation lately; it was fresh and new because only [somewhat] lately has 'Social' itself been made possible through Facebook.
But as I see things, we don't make friends because they have our tastes or because they can correctly recommend us stuff we'd like; we simply feel really good with friends, no matter what they like. Only the people who have our tastes can help us finding what we should like, or at least be able to do it better than most of our friends.
Basing recommendation solely on our social circle's tastes is like thinking our friends are the ones with the closest tastes to ours. And I think that's wrong.
Unless I got it wrong, Rex.ly for example, is taking a much better approach by letting you select specific friends to influence your recommendations.