With “Graph Search,” Facebook's newsearch engine announced recently,
the world's largest social network has finally begun to index a trove of
Big Data that's been piling up for years. Even Facebook
probably doesn't know what's
been deposited in by its 1 billion members. Suddenly there is a way to find out.
For
all its popularity, Facebook has lacked something that could be
described as “purpose.” For co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark
Zuckerberg, sharing isn't a platitude ‑ it's world-altering. As he once
said: “By giving people the power to share, we're making the world more
transparent.” Yet Facebook is, for the most part, fun and games. It's
also, in the opinion of some, including me, a Faustian bargain that
gives the company valuable information with which to make money, and its
members the ability to do things they can do any number of other ways.
For
all the information Facebook members share with one another �"
pictures, opinions, “likes,” preferences, the companies and celebrities
they follow �" none of it has been searchable. So if you have friends
who like science fiction and live nearby, you wouldn't have known it
(unless you, you know, knew it), and that Avatar movie night wouldn't
have happened �" or, worse, would have happened alone, like always.
The
sum of all that information makes it much more valuable than its parts,
not only to Facebook but also to its members. That's why Graph Search
makes Facebook membership an entirely new proposition, compelling not
just because of some raw network effect ‑ all my friends are there, so I
have to be ‑ but because you can now be discovered by strangers who can
do things for you, like offer you a job.
This new relationship
could go a long way toward tempering privacy concerns at Facebook, which
maximises sharing and minimises discussion of sharing's pitfalls. I
suspect the vast majority of Facebook members are blithely indifferent
to the extent to which their lives are open books, even as they do
things on the larger Web, not realizing they're being logged on
Facebook. It's pretty clear that Facebook's members largely don't care
about the consequences of a privacy breach until it happens.
Graph Search may be just the gentle persuasion Facebook
members need to seriously manage their privacy settings, and thus give Facebook more cover in the privacy tango.
And
if profile management becomes a more rigorous pursuit, then Facebook's
internal search transforms Facebook into a more professional-oriented
site. “Facebooking” yourself may replace “Googling” yourself as the gold
standard in vanity search, if only because you'll be more concerned
about seeing yourself as others see you. Your social life would become
more compartmentalised to a small circle of confidants �" Graph Search
is designed to respect individual privacy settings �" while you give
your professional identity, and all of its poise and polish, more
prominence.
Facebook with Graph Search could remain a playground
for the college crowd while giving grown-ups a bigger reason to stay and
share even more about themselves. And now it needn't be a deal with the
devil but a collaboration, where the payoff is simple and direct. You
wouldn't just be the product anymore, fodder sold to third parties, but a
full participant in a market made and facilitated by Facebook.
Graph
Search is still in limited beta release, so it will be some time before
the competitive threat to Google or the business-focused social network
LinkedIn can be assessed. Share prices in both companies fell after
Facebook's announcement.
With the development of Graph Search,
the irony of Facebook's own timeline continues. Once the most exclusive
private network in the world, it's now the biggest public network the
world has ever seen. And after years of prodding, cajoling and tricking
people into sharing, Facebook is finally sharing back.
