One of the reasons for attending SMX was to hear close-up some more opinions on the role of social in search engine optimization.

Gillian Muessig put this eloquently and I’ll paraphrase: five years ago every internet journey began with a Google search. Now, many trips begin within a social network then migrate to a Google search when that’s necessary. So you might ask your Facebook friends to suggest a holiday destination or a web designer before you start Googling.

The effect of this is to shift some power away from we clever pants SEO people who understand how to build links, to the regular people who surf the web. In Gillian’s words, ‘your momma don’t link. She don’t know how’. But she knows how to Facebook.

Another strong thread in the conference was the flag-waving for Google Plus. A no-brainer, since G+ content goes straight into Google’s index. Some also say this content will enjoy privileged SEO status. In some areas I think this is likely.

Google already weights Twitter links favourably for “breaking news” topics. I can imagine them saying, we’re getting good quality tech content shared in Google Plus, so we’ll weight that for tech searches. If Google can persuade other communities to jump in, and the content is good quality, they’ll privilege that as well. They’ll use the SEO community as one of their communication channels.

See you on Google Plus.

Foursquare and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this Internet a new application. The latest venture capital love object is Foursquare, which has signed up 275,000 New Yorkers to a mobile phone GPS app that lets their friends know where they are.

Business Insider details how the app works; you check in when you go to a venue (a place which serves alcohol) and you get points for visiting. Then, if a friend happens to be in the same street, you can meet and have drinks, just as if you’d actually organised it.

The Business Insider article is the normal breathless account of a new startup about to take over the world. The comments on the article tell another story. “I played with it for a few months, and obsessively checked in everywhere… I stopped participating over a month ago.” And “4 square fills up my Twitter with meaningless crap. Well I should say: even more meaningless crap.”

As I understand it, you can limit your Foursquare friends to a subset of your Twitter friends, but I suspect the status updates (which are juvenile in style) go to all contacts. This is spam for most people and will wear thin. If Foursquare can’t deliver this to only your interested subset, we’ll probably see Facebook and Twitter introduce friend categories. “Bar buddy/friend of mother”. Would seem to be a sensible development anyway.

For Gen Y in particular, mobile applications will affect how people meet and what they do when they get there. Although there seems to be nothing particularly compelling about Foursquare it has its own API so developers will build on the functionality. The value will be in creating apps that address specific niches. Groups of teen boys meeting new groups of teen girls. Business people finding the closest available php programmer. I can imagine an app that o.O that’s a good one. Might keep that one to myself :p