A team of ex-Google veterans plans to harvest the rich social datastream to bring us a new breed of search application; the code name for the yet-to-be-launched project is Mechanical Zoo. The team consists of Nathan Stoll, former product lead of Google News, Mac Ventilla, former business dev manager at Google, Fritz Schneider, an ex application-security engineer at Google, and Damon Horowitz, former lead engineer of a search company Perspecta, sold to Excite@Home back in the dot-com boom days.
The actual product is not publicly available in any shape or form at this moment, but a hundred alpha-testers are currently testing the service, which means that it is in already in at least somewhat usable form. The main idea behind Mechanical Zoo is to give you answers such as "where to eat in San Francisco tonight," tailored specifically for your needs. They better hurry, though, as FriendFeed's search is actually already quite good at doing exactly that.