There has been a lot of buzz around social search in the online tech community, but I am largely disappointed by the new tools and services I've encountered. It's not that these sites are unusable, but that they each seem to take on a different conception of what social search is and when/how it will be useful. Have these sites actually studied users doing social search tasks?
B. Jansen, D. Booth, and A. Spink. WWW '07: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, page 1149--1150. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2007)