When web bookmarking and note-taking began to grow in popularity, it was only a matter of time before things got social.  We’ve seen the industry groping its way towards a more socially-oriented form of sharing web content, but nothing that’s fully contextualized the benefits of our evolving social web.  Springpad’s notebook app is taking the leap into the social realm, a move that I’ve anticipated for some time now.  And having had a chance to play around with it for a little while before the launch, I’m anxious to see how Springpad will continue to integrate its social features.

Called Friends Stuff, Springpad aggregates aspects of the social web on its site in a way that’s easy to navigate and discover content from your friends.  Categorized across things like books, movies, television programs, recipes and websites to name a few, Friends Stuff shows you the things your friends have not only bookmarked on their own Springpad account, but Liked on Facebook, rated on Rotten Tomatoes, or Wish-listed on Amazon.  Pull up a given piece of content, and you’ll also be able to see which of your friends have also indicated an interest in that content.

And from there, you can add it to one of your notebooks, or further interact with it across all the social sites now aggregated on Springpad.  A movie, for instance, can be purchased, Liked, rated or bookmarked.  and in adding it to your own Springpad account, you are actionizing that movie for a later action–perhaps you’d like to know when the DVD goes on sale on Amazon, or when it’s playing at a nearby theater.  Your interaction with Springpad content is an indication of your interest, and with Springpad’s very action-oriented system of note-taking and bookmarking, the new social element merely simplifies that process.

There’s countless directions Springpad can take with Friends Stuff, but in experimenting with the new feature and chatting with CEO Jeff Janer, it boils down to a form of recommendations on-demand.  What Friends Stuff offers is a centralized repository for a wealth of web content, beyond the expected Facebook Likes.  And its seamless approach means you can search locally to find nearby restaurant recommendations, or across certain parameters to get a suggestion for a book, while you’re shopping at the bookstore (or your Kindle–either works).  Combining the cloud with the leveraged social web allows Springpad to approach social search and recommendations in a new way, and the added context is something that will only grow in value as users and more social sites are incorporated into Springpad’s efforts.

But when you look at aggregating the social web, and in turn contextualizing it around various and highly personalized action items, it really is a daunting task.  “It’s a huge data project,” Janer says of Springpad’s new social integration.  “The idea that I can go to a movie and aggregate all these multiple sources to one version of the Hangover–that’s taken us a couple months of dev work to get the kinks out and work that.”

“People can Like Starbucks or coffee, but that’s not particularly useful to you as a signal,” Janer goes on.  “So we’ve had to not only normalize the data across check-ins and Likes, but make it make sense to you.  Working with vast amounts of data is one challenge, and the next challenge, also data related, is adding Foursquare check-ins.  We’re going to have to dedupe that someone checked in on Foursquare and Facebook.”

It’s a serious effort Springpad’s undergoing here, but it’s only another step towards their end goal.  Developing a business model around social web aggregation is a dream for many companies right now, and Springpad’s working towards finding the best fit between a personal service and a direct marketing tool.  Acting as a segue between brand and consumer, Springpad’s biggest benefit lies in its service to the end user.  Maintaining that service is key to attracting business interest, as Springpad works on building the right features to serve its two masters.  And at the center of it all likes data analysis at a level that must scale out across the social web, as well as scaling down to the individual consumer.