indyank - 10:09 am on Feb 18, 2011 (gmt 0)

martinibuster, Thanks for sharing it.So it does look like google might not have much insight into FB "Likes".But FB is the place, where real offline friends get connected more than on twiter.FB lets you to huddle into your own social circle more than twitter!

Twitter is a free for all.People follow others whom they had never met before (or will never meet anytime) and share what they share...It is a place where People make 140 character announcements and if they get followed by too many people like for example Matt Cutts, it gets retweeted by all and sundry...not just your social circle...

So, both have positives and negatives and it is unfortunate that google would not be able to do much with FB at this stage...

One thing for sure is Google is now working hard to promote the brands "Twitter", "Facebook", etc. indirectly!

And for the first time google will depend on third party services, on a somewhat major scale, as inputs to their ranking engines! Until now, they could crawl links on the web without any help, but now they would depend more on Twitter and to some extent on FB and others for this social search... (Yes, they could still crawl these citations, but Twitter, Facebook etc. have more control on what googlebots can do on their sites)

With this announcement, I guess, the valuation of twitter would have jumped many time higher...