I wish it came with a -1 as well, but I imagine that will develop by itself. Significantly, this is based on your contacts, rather than what everyone at Facebook/Digg/whoever likes. I think this is a winning characteristic.
To most people Facebook's graph represents their friends, their family, their coworkers, people they went to high school with, random people who sent a request even though you met them once at a party... that is the norm. I've been saying for a while that the best representation of a true social graph is on you Android and iPhones. the people you call, text, email, and Facebook wall post are the people you care about. Why Google and Apple haven't used this to their advantage yet, I'm not sure.
There're potential privacy implications to using your call logs to build an implicit social graph. People have an expectation that their phone call records will remain private; look at all the trouble the NSA got into when they started spying on them. There's no such expectation when you explicitly give your relationship data to a third-party website.
Not to say it won't happen, but a bunch of things need to be worked out on the legal/ethical/cultural side of things before this is practical. As PG always says, social changes take longer than technical changes.
I have two contacts in my email, one is my Mom, and the other is my male boss. All of a sudden I am seeing lots of transgenderfication sites in my results. Mom?
It would still be a violation of privacy because it is crossing the friend/contact line.
Ah, sorry for not stating that more clearly. What I meant by 'everyone at Facebook' was not the stuff on your wall etc., but where you see an article with the Facebook icon and 2,000 'likes' next to it. I don't expect that number to be reflective of my social graph in any way; it tells me only that 2000 Facebook users have expressed a liking for it. Likewise, a high number of votes for or against something on YouTube holds little personal interest for me, since so many people visit YouTube. But if there is a strong positive or negative bias among the peple I am in frequent contact with for particular google results, that's useful to me in the same way that the social graph is useful to you.
Arguably Google's results ecosystem is just a larger and less-structured social silo than Facebook or any other social networking service, but then the web itself is a subset of the internet and the internet is a subset of the whole dataverse. I'm not saying those other products/services are bad, just that this one will deliver more obvious utility to me, given my existing way of working.
