A recent post about social objects by Hugh Macleod of The Gaping Void got me thinking about what opportunities might lie in making otherwise solitary online activities into social ones. This led me to think about how a previous idea that I posted could significantly increase the viral coefficient of search.

You may want to check out Hugh’s post for a detailed description of social objects but my take on what they are is that they are objects of common interest to two or more people over a period of time and conversation, however brief. So if you and I strike up a conversation about the weather then the weather, albeit fleetingly, becomes a social object.

For me, there are three primary online activities that we still predominantly engage in by ourselves as opposed to with other people – browsing, searching and shopping. There are probably opportunities in making any of these three activities social – hence the seemingly endless queue of start-ups trying to be the next big thing in social browsing, social searching or social shopping. I will focus on searching however because quite frankly, as demonstrated by Google, hardly anything beats search for generating online ad revenue.

Looking at the various start-ups doing so called social searching, it seems to me that most are trying too hard to make too much of a big deal out of it – focusing on group search, human-powered search etc. I have always felt that after search, Q&A is probably the next best thing for intent-based ad serving. So why not combine the two, allowing users to turn their unresolved search queries into questions for their social network and others outside their networks who have expressed an interest or expertise in that topic or related topics?

The beauty of this marriage for me is that as financially rewarding as search has proven to be, its viral coefficient is zero. Redeye VC defines the viral coefficient of an application or tool as “how many new users get added virally from each additional user”. So the viral coefficient of search is zero because when you do a search on Google say, you typically do so on your own and the ads shown are only seen by you. By combining search and Q&A however, you increase the viral coefficient of a single search by multiples and by so doing also increase the number of people exposed to ads related to that search.

As I have suggested in another post, I think Facebook is in a prime position to implement such a search/Q&A application, in conjunction with Yahoo (through Yahoo Answers perhaps) or either of the other two search giants.

What do you think?