Facebook recently called for a press conference. A lot of experts debated about whether or not Facebook might launch a new smartphone. Let’s just say there were a whole lot of rumors floating around. I have to say, the most interesting thing to me was that they actually cared to hold an event at all. Does Facebook suddenly care what people think? Facebook’s prior record is to launch whatever they have and then see what the public thinks about it afterwards. Being a publicly speculated stock might have changed all that. Now Facebook is following in Apple’s footsteps and utilizing their position to build up expectations – expectations that might become too unrealistic, just like they usually are for Apple announcements. When it came down to it, Facebook presented their new graph search feature.
What is this mysterious sounding graph search feature? Will it make Google shake in their boots or has Facebook come up with something entirely groundbreaking that will change our lives forever? Not likely. Think of it as the world’s largest and most accurate rolodex. You will basically be able to search behaviors and life events. A great example is if you want to to play matchmaker – you would be able to search for friends-of-friends who live in a specific area and are currently single. You could also search for products or people that your friends like.
The graph search feature is of course a whole lot more advanced than that also. However, the basics of it are that this new graph search could reinvent the way we search for people, products, habits and events. Basically, as I said, it’s the world’s largest lifestyle rolodex, if that make sense.
Whether or not this new graph search feature will be as important to people as Facebook want us to believe it is remains to be seen. The feature is currently in beta and is yet to be perfected. Mark Zuckerberg admitted that even though the basic features of the graph search would prevent any embarrassing information to be searched, there could still be things searchable if the user had not paid full attention to his or her privacy settings. That is something he said the user will be prompted to do with a banner alert at the time the graph search feature is publicly released.
It will be interesting to see what kind of impact this feature really has when it is actually made available to all of us. One thing is for sure though, being liked on Facebook has never been more important.
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