I was speaking with a real insider in the social software space and they told me yesterday that Tim Koogle, the former CEO of Yahoo!, is considering taking the CEO slot at Friendster and morphing the company into a search engine (this rumor has been around for a while.) Koogle is on the board of Friendster and is an early investor.

The concept is that all the data you and your friends put into Friendster would be the starting point for your searches. So, if you knew that me and my friends went to the follow tech related schools (i.e. MIT,) worked at the following tech companies (i.e. Yahoo, AOL, etc.,) and had computers and Internet in our interests field then you would tailor the search towards those verticals.

Google Personalized Search is obviously heading in this direction, and their launch of Orkut and failed attempt to buy Friendster makes this rumor believable to me.

I saw Tim Koogle at PC Forum last week and he was talking about Friendster a whole lot and he was chatting up a storm with people. Hmmmmm….

Update: David had the story first two days ago.