A "Social Search Engine"

A social search engine would work like this: enter the name of someone you know and press enter. The engine then goes through all the hip web 2.0 social networks and looks for a person with that name. In the end, you will get a list of blogs, accounts on Facebook, MySpace and the like, twitter feeds, and so on.

Why would I want that?

I am sure a lot of my friends are using social sites in ways that I don't know about. And I would potentially like to know what they are up to.

So whenever I find someone on Linkedin, I would also use the social search engine to see whether she is active in any other place as well.

Of course, the next step would be a tool that searches all my address books every now and again in order to find friends automatically.

Update: Just found something on Guy Kawasaki's twitter feed: Spokeo seems to do some of the above...

Update: data portability is now the next big buzzword, and all the big social sites have jumped on the bandwaggon. We'll see how far it all goes... check dataportability.org for more information.