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Google dominated industry chatter this week with its announcement of Buzz and swirling rumors of its plans to acquire social search service Aardvark. Foursquare also made headlines for its new partnerships with Zagat and the New York Times. We’ve summarized these items and more in the recap below.

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Google has launched a new experimental feature in Google Labs that searches your social circle in addition to your regular Google search results. Announced at Web 2.0 in San Francisco last week, Google Social Search is currently in its Beta testing phase.

What Will Social Search Pull?

Greatly impacted by Google’s announcement last week of their search partnership with Twitter , Social Search culls the following data from your Social Circle.

• Twitter feeds
• Google profiles (namely Picasa and Blogger)
• FriendFeed
• Your own Google Reader feeds

According to Google, your Social Circle is made of:

• Contacts from Gmail and Gchat
• People you are publicly connected to on other social sites (Twitter and Friendfeed for now)
• Publicly shared content of friends of friends
• Feeds you follow on Google Reader

The social graph is an increasingly familiar online model. It represents the amplification and diffusion of a message through a user’s friend network.

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