On October 26^th, Google rolled out the first release of its new Social Search, which pulls results from content posted on the Net by your most trusted sources, your friends.

It is still an experiment. To activate the social search feature, users have to opt-in and create a Google Profile with the list of their social networks. Google will do the rest, by indexing their social graph and applying its search algorithms to match the queries with the content posted by the users’ friends. The user becomes the link to what he posts.

It is a game changing move in the search space, the dawn of a paradigm shift in the way information and products are found and promote themselves in the digital space. When the curation of content becomes human, influencing the ranking is no longer a matter of bids on a keyword or SEO tricks. You can pay as much as you want, but if your unhappy customers happen to be my friends or if your competitor’s happy customers belong to my circle, you can shout as you want, but I’m not listening.

But, what about Google? Isn’t it afraid that, with search being distributed throughout your social circle, AdWords will start to rapidly lose that 25% of search volumes, that is still its main source of revenues?

So far, sponsored ads have blended with organic search results in an almost symbiotic way. So much so, that in the age of rich media, the most effective format is still a simple text ad.

• What happens though, when users start looking for a recognized name or face within the search result? Will sponsored ads click-throughs decline?
• How is Google preparing itself to counter this revenue shortcoming? What new formats should we expect? How do you make an ad resemble a friend?
• How will targeting evolve? Are keywords still going to be the most effective way to measure our purchasing intentions? Or shall we expect behavorial targeting to finally take off, as the spider keeps crawling what we post and share?
• How will sentiment analysis play a role in this, when my content and my friends’ content becomes spiderable? Will Google show results only from companies that I am most likely to click? What if most of my friends have criticized company X? Would it still make sense to show that sponsored ad?

It will take time for sure for all the changes to happen. Google profiles are still a niche thing for a few geeks. But once time comes, are we all going to become Google “AdFriends”?

BREAKING NEWS (SORT OF..)

-Google launches a free ad-supported music service in China with the blessing of the labels. [WSJ]

TRENDS

-Why buy when you can listen free?

- The agreement between Spotify and 7Digital sparks a debate on the mixed streaming-store business model.  Glenn Peoples at Billboard views Lala as a possible winner because of its more focused user experience. [Billboard]

-But what do teenagers in the US want? According to a new report by NPD, teens acquired 19% less music in 2008 than they did in 2007. CD purchasing declined 26 % and paid digital downloads fell 13% compared with the prior year. In contrast, 52% of teens listened to online radio in 2008 vs  34% in 2007. Downloading or listening to music on social networks also saw a large increase from 26% in 2007 to 46% in 2008. [NPD Press Release].

-TIme for more numbers with Q1 already over. And the reality is again doom and gloom for the music industry with no Platinum album for the entire first quarter of 2009. Not a single new album sold more than a million copies in the U.S. (enough to win the platinum distinction) [MusicIndustryReport]

GOING UP, DOWN OR UNDER

-Fearing the outcome of lawsuits by Warner Music and EMI, music search engine and playlist generator SeeqPod has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection.  [HypeBot] Streamzy which let users build playlists from the songs on SeeqPod and YouTube, is on sale on eBay. [Epicenter].

-After blocking all music to UK users, YouTube is now yanking tunes in Germany, after the expiration of its contract with local royalty collector GEMA [PaidContentUK]. At the same time, Amazon opens its MP3 store in Germany [HypeBot]

-Last.fm is still free. Plans to launch the subscription service worldwide except for the US, UK and Germany have been delayed and Last.fm will focus on accelerating new features as SMS billing [MusicAlly]

-How is MySpace Music doing? Epicenter has an in-depth review. Reading is recommended. [Epicenter]

-What is Facebook Connect for? There are many ways to use it and one of them is to automate file-sharing:that’s what Pirate Bay is up to. Now under each track you can find a Share it on Facebook link! [HypeBot]

-More headaches for Ticketmaster, faced with a new classaction for its secondary ticket market practice. This one comes from the US. [MusicAlly]

GOING MOBILE

-On the AppStore side, some good news for Music Apps: the Pandora IPhone App hit 4 million downloads, AOL Radio 3.6million and other music app stars as Clear Channel iHeartRadio, Shazam, Tap Tap Revenge are not far (though numbers are not confirmed) [DigitalMusicNews]. In the meantime, Lala is rushing to get its app live, but still has some kinks to work out according to TechCrunch [TechCrunch]

-At CTIA RIM launches its new BlackBerry World App and one of its focus will be Music [MocoNews]

-And what is Nokia up to? It’s preparing its app store and it promises it will be a “smart” and “social” one. [VentureBeat interview]

GOING SOCIAL

-The clever team behind MusicMetrics launches MuZoid. a Twitter music exploration application. Send a tweet with the name of a band or artist to twitter.com/muzoid and in seconds you receive a link to a web page with gigs, a discography with price comparisons between vendors, and a recommendation of similar artists that you might enjoy.MuZoid uses MusicMetric’s text-mining technology to provide gig and album information for each artist. The company regularly sifts through data from a database of over 6 million artists. If MuZoid doesn’t know an artist, she makes a note of it and gets busy learning. Once enough information’s available, she’ll tweet back to the original querant with an update.[TechCrunch UK]

-Moonalice will post live tracks from their new CD release show on Twitter. Immediately following the end of each song, Moonalice’s sound team will upload it and “Tweet” its availability! [HypeBot]

-SellaBand, one of the online services that enables music fans to invest in up-and-coming artists, will sell its artists on CreateSpace, an Amazon company via a dedicated SellaBand store [Press Release]. Chuck D, named its US Ambassador, speaks about the project and the importance of being good internet marketers to win in the new digital era of music [MusicAlly]

-TopSpin CEO on the importance of engaging fans as a marketing tool [TopSpin]

It’s been official for 24 hours now: Google has launched an ad-supported free music search in China, with the backing of more than 140 record labels, including the Big 4.

The Google service allows Chinese consumers to search for music, link to the Web site of a Beijing company called Top100.cn and download licensed music from that Chinese site, which has signed contracts with the music industry. Screenshots for non-Chinese readers have been made available by Music 2.0. It looks pretty slick, with lyrics, a flash player, upsell of ringback tones. Tracks are DRM free and high-quality (192kbps).

The news was not unexpected. It is a tactical move for Google to win market share against its long-time competitor Baidu, which has about 62 percent of the Chinese search engine market and has grown partly by offering music search services and linking to sites that offer free downloads of music. By comparison, Google has only about 28 percent of the search engine market in China. Pretty lame for a Google!

So a new alliance Google-Record Labels is born with the immediate goal to try to monetize the world largest illegal music market, China. Revenues will/should come through advertising, which will be shared between Google and the Labels.  China has been a tough nut to crack for the music industry in “traditional” ways: Chinese consumers have skipped the CD generation and happily jumped into the Napster-p2p file-sharing one.

But whatever the immediate goals, it is evident that this is/will soon be a Paradigm Shift for both the industry and consumers and it is going to be a global one.

In the words of MediaFuturist Gerd Leonhard: if this works in China, why not do this everywhere else? If this works for Google, why not for telecoms, ISPs and mobile operators?  If this works for music, why not – sooner or later – for music, TV, video, books and newspapers?