On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Firstly, let's answer the question, what is Google Social Search? While using Google some of the answers displayed after you enter a search query are "Results from people in your social circle". Let's break this down a little further. These results are from people you are in contact with either on Twitter, Gmail, Google Buzz etc. The purpose behind this is that you might want to read and find out info from people you are in contact with and therefore trust, rather than information provided by strangers. The reasoning behind this rungs quiet deep. Search has been constantly changing and people now want to know what is the best camera to buy from their Twitter and Facebook friends. Search has been evolving and so has Google. So when your type a search query and a social friend of yours already has a blog post of a Twitter update that is relevant, it shows up in your Google search results. So in addition to the usual Google results, you also see relevant results from peo...