Well, actually, it’s a guest-post by David Sacks of geni.com (personally recommended for all your family tree needs). Interesting and very discuss-able view on the future of portals, and to some extent Facebook. Basic premise is the evolution from browse to search to navigation and information consumption powered by social graphs such as the facebook friend network. There’s a lot to debate about the argument here, but it’s a nice change of pace from the usual fare in that it’s actually thought-provoking.

“The advantage of this approach is that it makes it relatively effortless for users to access a world of information that is both increasingly comprehensive and personal to them. Even if all this information were available through search (and it’s not), search actually requires work; the user must know what they’re looking for and type it in. Then they must parse the results to determine which are valuable, labor which is not shared and reused by others. By contrast, Facebook requires no work once your network is set up. Your friends push information to you that is likely to be useful, and if not you can tune your preferences until it is. Facebook promises a kind of Socratic knowledge: it tells users things they didn’t even think to ask.”

Read the post.