Interesting news in the social space - BusinessWeek reports that Microsoft is in talks to buy or partner with two-year old startup Eurekster, creators of the social search tool Swicki. They're also interested in creating a social Question and Answer service, ala Yahoo Answers. This is interesting, because we always assume that Yahoo is leading in the social software race. It also puts me in mind of Live Expo - Microsoft's classifieds service that allows you to make transactions within your immediate social network.
But it's not just social search: there are hints that Microsoft may cotton on to revenue sharing, too. The article revisits MSN Search and Win - in many ways, this is actually a paid-to-search model. Unfortunately, this isn't quite the right approach - it makes more sense to pay users to improve your search results (see also my thoughts on paying del.icio.us users, then connect the dots). It'll be interesting to see what happens to the other social search startups - Wink, Jookster, Prefound, Filangy et al - now that the big guns are moving in. And of course community is Google's biggest weakness: will they ever make a social search play?