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Yesterday, I wrote a piece about Like.com, a visual search engine company based in Silicon Valley that was reporting great progress: The young site has had rocketing visitor traffic over the past four months, and it’s headed toward profitability. People are using it to find the color or style of shoes they like, and then clicking through to merchants to buy them, and Like gets a cut, according to chief executive Munjal Shah, who showed me his internal data. The site today released its new, slicker look (see Shah’s post about it here).

In the piece, however, I also quoted Shah as saying Like.com is “killing” the social shopping engines, including Santa Monica, Calif.-based ThisNext. He argued that’s because shoppers don’t like sharing their shopping preferences with each other; shopping decisions are more solitary than most people think. Critics took me to task for not investigating Shah’s claims more deeply, so I decided to do a little more digging, even though I provided quite a bit of context and justification already in the original piece and in subsequent clarifying comments.

Namely, I talked with Gordon Gould (left), chief executive of ThisNext, and I’ve got a lot more to say: In short, ThisNext practically hasn’t gotten started yet, and it faces huge, perhaps insurmountable challenges. However, its vision — if it ever is realized — is more profound and much more powerful than Like.com’s. It’s true that Like.com is indeed killing ThisNext for now on a revenue basis. But it’s really not fair to use the “now” as our measure, because ThisNext is using venture capital to build out a bold, audacious “product graph” project and isn’t yet focused on making money, or even on maximizing traffic.

So let’s go back to the Like.com v. ThisNext debate, and I’ll tell you why I think that, in the end, this is an apples to oranges comparison that isn’t fair.

I initially told critic Fred Wilson his reaction centered too much around the traffic question and not about their respective revenues, which is what Like.com’s Shah says he’d intended to refer to. Both measures, I’d argue, should be looked at when judging success, because one can often be traded off against the other, especially in the early days of a company.

So first of all, let’s start with traffic. Fred showed an old Comscore graph through December, depicting how the traffic of both sites is comparable through most of last year. However, that graph showed Like.com’s traffic exploding upward in December, which Like.com’s Shah (left) explains was due to a number of factors, but none a primary driver. He admitted he was buying traffic (by placing ads next to Google search results; for example, next to a search for “red snappy shoes”), but he was doing a lot of other things too, which we noted here and here. His traffic continues to be robust through Jan and Feb, and is now at 3 million unique visitors. ThisNext, meanwhile, only got 1.4 million uniques in January, says Gould. So, no question Like is beating ThisNext, but ThisNext isn’t buying any traffic, Gould tells me.

Now let’s go to revenue. Like.com’s Shah says he’ll make more than $10 million this year, Gould says he’ll probably make about half that. Again, Like.com wins. But again, ThisNext’s Gould has an out: He’s not focused on making money at this stage.

Like.com is aggressively focused on an arbitrage business, buying traffic at a price and then making more money on the traffic it gets than what it pays for the traffic, Gould argues. ThisNext, by contrast, is in the “discovery” business, he says.

Like’s Shah is flat out wrong that people don’t consult with others when buying, Gould adds. If people are using Like.com, they’re likely to be further along in the shopping process, Gould concedes. But otherwise, people often go into the store and end up buying something they never planned to buy. “It happens all the time,” Gould said, both in offline and online shopping. If a cute saleswoman says you look terrific in those jeans you’re trying, you’re gonna buy those denims even if they’re $20 more expensive. If your friend likes them too, you’ll probably buy two pair. Online, people – especially women — send IMs and email back and forth with URLs and coupons of stores or products they’ve found, he says.

Some 70 percent of shopping is made on a discovery basis, and only 30 percent is made from search, Gould says, citing research. Research from Womma.org shows that 27 percent of social conversations have some meaningful discussion of products, suggesting that social interaction is powerful input into our decision making.

To help in the shopping discovery process, ThisNext is building what Gould calls a “product graph,” or essentially a compilation of the web of connections between people who buy trendy products and other people they influence, as well as a graph that tracks the products themselves. What you end up with is a dataset that lets you know who the influencers are and which products are popular in which populations. The challenge for ThisNext, then, is to grow large enough so it can become the leading “product recommendation” service across the Web.

For instance, if you are an influential flyfisher and recommend products to others from your MySpace page, ThisNext wants you to be able to access those same recommendations while on other sites, via social network platforms offered by Facebook and others. Right now, the site is trying to optimize its reach across the web, and so traffic to its home page isn’t the primary goal.

If it gets there — and this will be very, very hard, in my view — ThisNext could be a boon to the social sites such as Facebook and MySpace, which are looking to make money. By becoming a plug-in social shopping layer in each site (just like Photobucket offers the photo layer for MySpace, YouTube offers the video layer, and PayPal offers a purchasing layer, etc.), ThisNext would earn revenue each time a user buys something through it, via an affiliate payment. ThisNext would then share the revenue with these social sites. With an effective CPM advertising rate of about $30, ThisNext’s offering would be stronger than many other ways of making money, Gould says.

In the long run, eBay, which already has lots of information about its shoppers and preferences, could be headed in this direction and so poses ThisNext’s toughest competition going forward. Other players, however, have fallen by the wayside (Kaboodle was bought by Hearst and no longer looks like a threat, says Gould; and Stylehive and Stylefeeder appear too focused on fashion, he says).

To conclude, comparing ThisNext with Like.com seems premature. Has Like.com really killed social search? Yes, probably, in the short term, if you’re only looking at the numbers. But social shopping search and shopping technology is still in its infancy, and we haven’t given it a chance. It’s absurd to make any conclusion right now that social shopping search has lost to visual shopping search.

(Updated) Here’s the latest action, catching up for the past two days:

Boring shopping Web sites attract interest — There are so many shopping search engines, we’ve given up trying to count. And yet investors remain interested. Santa Monica, Calif.’s ThisNext, a social shopping Web site, has raised a round of venture debt Western Technology. It lets people share and recommend products with friends. This comes after rumors that private equity firm Providence Equity Partners is buying 66 percent of Nextag, the Silicon Valley also-ran shopping search engine, for between $1 and $1.2 billion, which would be huge. GigaOm has the story, but classifies it as a rumor. We requested comment from Nextag chief executive Pernendu Ojha Wednesday afternoon, but no word yet. Nextag is reportedly doing $200 million in revenues, with a lucrative mortgage and other lead generation business going — it buys ads from Google to get business.

Forget instant messaging, get ready for instant thinking — Brown University researchers have developed a way to let a man play simple games by moving a cursor with only his brain, no hands. We’ve read about similar research before; it starting with monkeys. So here comes the future: All work, emails, spreadsheets, and Google searches, will one day be performed by mind control. No way around it. You won’t need that Google chip in the brain, because you’ll be able to control everything, not just Google search. And then there’s the next step — “network-enabled telepathy” — or instant thought transfer. Your thoughts will flow from your brain over the network right into someone else’s brain, according to a DARPA researcher.

EBay moves into radio auctions — EBay will begin allowing radio stations to auction advertising air time on its platform, in cooperation with Bid4Spots Inc. of Encino, Calif. More than 2,300 radio stations are expected to participate. However, we’re not certain why this will work, when its effort in TV didn’t seem to work.

Yahoo prices ads on value of traffic — Yahoo’s Panama charges advertisers more to place ads on sites likely to draw the most valuable traffic, based on the number of people who click on ads and their likelihood of carrying through with an order. See statement here.

Google purchase of PeakStream — See our story here.

The Amp’d whitewashing begins — Amp’d Mobile, the bankrupt mobile network that offers entertainment to youth, no longer has the ridiculously high number of board members cited earlier (20). Jon Auerbach of Highland Capital Partners and Allen Beasley of Redpoint Ventures have resigned, Dan Primack points out. Each has removed mention of the company from their online bios. Highland has gone so far as to remove Amp’d from its online list of portfolio companies. Too bad. We like style of venture firm Bessemer: The firm boldly lists its mistakes.

Microsoft’s search engine skunk works not as reported — Earlier, we cited a report by Techcrunch that Microsoft has launched a stealth search project here in Silicon Valley. However, search expert John Battelle has heard the report is not correct, and says stay tuned.

This Google Street View gets worse — We’ve ragged on the service’s privacy problems already. Now we find out that Google’s cameras took a shot of a guy peeing on the side of the road, and this is still in its maps. Harder to believe is that Google has left it up for a full day after it was discovered by bloggers. See details via Digg. We’ve requested comment from Google. [Update: Kate Hurowitz, of Google, responded: "...we respect the fact that people may not want imagery they feel is objectionable featured on the service. We provide easily accessible tools for flagging inappropriate or sensitive imagery for review and removal." We at VentureBeat didn't see those tools immediately, but we do notice the offending image has now been taken down.]

Michael Volpi has joined Joost – We reported this; it is now official.

Ready for your iPhone? — See the company’s latest ads.

LaLa Media pays for music, and gives it to you for free — Lala is one of the quirkier companies in Silicon Valley. A year ago, we were puzzled when the Palo Alto, Calif. start-up launched as a CD-swapping service. CDs in 2007? We were puzzled again when it pocketed $14.7 million from Bain Capital (a private equity firm with little experience with start-ups) and Ignition, another venture firm. And then we really scratched our head when it bought a radio station, WOXY. What next? Well, as widely reported yesterday, Lala has blitzed the world by offering to serve music for free, directly from its Web site, and it has the agreement from Warner Music Group to do that with Warner’s music assets. Lala and Warner believe this will stimulate sales. If you like the music you listen to, you can buy the album. True to the odd style of this company, chief executive Bill Nguyen has decided he won’t let you buy individual songs — and for no apparent reason. Also, Lala will change pricing, depending on the popularity of the album, what is in your music library already, and other factors — which could create confusion. Lala also said it is working to license music from the other three labels.

Crazier, Lala will pay about $140 million to the labels in order to do this streaming. But unlike other music-subscription services, which charge users a monthly fee, Lala gives you this all for free.

The radical nature it all, and Lala’s ability to hack Apple’s iPod platform, is masterful: Separately, Lala lets you pay to download songs to your iPod for $0.99 cents, and you can do so only with the iPod — no other device. Once you do this, you can’t move the music elsewhere. So it it is a digital rights management (DRM) equivalent. It’s a direct attack on Apple’s iTunes, and ignores other devices too. It counts on people discovering the service through its web site. What’s more, Lala is getting its investors to pay for it. It said it is raising some $40 million to pay for expected short-term losses (there’s so much capital floating around, Lala may actually find a VC to fund this).

Finally, its program will scan your desktop for digital tracks — everything from iTunes downloads, ripped CDs, etc — and then keeps it all for you in an account online so you can access it from anywhere. It then lets you download that to your iPod too. And you won’t be able to use iTunes again unless you reconfigure your iPod! To our knowledge, Apple hasn’t responded to this yet. This is such an endearingly outrageous move by Lala that that we find ourselves warming to this company. It’s a very long, desperate shot, but if it works, it could be big.

More details at Gizmodo and at Techdirt.

Ask.com’s new search – The second-tier search engine calls its new search “Ask3D,” but it’s a terrible name, because its not three dimensional. The 3D refers to three columns, a new way of organizing a search engine format. See below for an example of a search on Oakland. On the left is the search bar, and underneath are pointers to ways you can refine your search if you don’t find what you want — something that Google doesn’t have. In the middle column are the results. This is where the 3D search falls short. It is somewhat bewildering: An ad in the middle is barely demarcated (if you squint, you may be able to detect a ever so slight difference in shade). Finally, on the far right, Ask gives you different types of files related to your search: video, images, links to MP3 files, event listings and encyclopedia results from Wikipedia. Videos are provided by Blinkx, but not Google Video, another shortcoming. Finally, no ads on the right. More details here and here.