Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explains the three key pillars of Facebook -- Newsfeed, Timeline and its newest addition -- Graph Search (Click Image To Enlarge)
On January 15, 2013 at Facebook’s press event, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced its latest product, called Graph Search.
Zuckerberg made it very clear that this is not web search, but completely different:
"What’s more interesting than any of these things (that Facebook currently does) is giving people power and tools to take any cut of the graph that they want."
Zuckerberg explained the difference between web search and Graph Search.
“Web search is designed to take any open-ended query and give you links that might have answers.”
Linking things together based on things that you’re interested in is a “very hard technical problem,” according to Zuckerberg.Graph Search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, rather than links that might provide the answer.” For example, you could ask Graph Search
“Who are my friends that live in San Francisco?”
Zuckerberg joked that a difference is “filters,” which grabbed a few chuckles.
Zuckerberg says that Graph Search is in “very early beta.” The first interaction of Graph Search focuses on:
- People - Facebook Graph Search allows you to search for people who share your interest. You can use Graph Search for dating. If you wanted to set up a girlfriend with a potential date you can search for “Who are single men?” Stocky says. “I get the set of single men that are friends of people I’m friends with.” You can refine your search just to San Francisco, and add the filter “and are from India” if your friend is Indian. You can also use Graph Search for recruiting. Stocky says if he was looking for people to join the team at Facebook, he could search for NASA Ames employees who are friends with people at Facebook. If I wanted to reach out and recruit them, I could see who their friends are at Facebook. To refine them I can look for people who wrote they are “founders.”
- Photos - Photos is another big part of Graph Search. Results are sorted by engagement so you see the ones with the most likes and comments at the top. For example, Lars Rasmussen, Facebook engineer, searched for “photos of my friends taken at National Parks.” He got a gorgeous page of photos from Yosemite, Machu Pichu, and other parks. Some more things you can do include searching for photos you Like, or query for “Photos of Berlin, Germany in 1989″ that brings up Berlin Wall tear-down shots.
- Places - Another area that Graph Search touches is “places,” allowing you to search through places by city, or places where your friends have been anywhere in the world. For example, you can search for "restaurants, theaters, bars or businesses located in the city of San Francisco." This will definitely grab the interest of Foursquare, which has been working on its own search and exploration product. When people on the go search for restaurants, theaters, bars and businesses, they typically need directions to those locations, including the street address, city, state, zip code and phone numbers and other details, increasing the importance of data availability and accuracy.
- Interests - The interest search portion of Facebook Graph Search is pretty extensive, unlocking all types of content on Facebook. This is why the company has been collecting your interests for all these years. With Graph Search you can query “Movie my friends like,” which brings up the movies liked by most of my friends. A “People also liked” suggestion section shows movies also liked by the people that liked a result. So for “The Dark Knight Rises,” you get suggestions to check out “Batman: The Dark Knight,” and “Transformers.” It seems a lot like Amazon, but for interest discovery rather than purchasing — at least for now. Stocky explained, “If I wanted to find a new show to watch, the best way is to see a video clip of it.” He showed a search for what friends have watched that brought up clips of Archer, Modern Family, Seinfeld, and more. Stocky beamed “I can find something new to watch through the filter of my friends.” Graph Search makes it so that you'll never want to leave Facebook. Before, to find out what your friends liked, you had to go to each one's profile and look at their indiviual interests, a very time consuming task.
Facebook Graph Search is completely personalized. Tom Stocky of the search team explains.
"I gets unique results for a search of friends who Like Star Wars and Harry Potter. If anyone else does this search they get a completely different set of results. Even if someone had the same set of friends as me, the results would be different [because we have different relationships with our friends].”
The new Graph Search product will be integrated into privacy, as well. In the upper-right of Facebook’s bar, you will find shortcuts to privacy settings. You can granularly control which photos show up to the world, which will of course remove them from search results.
It’s a strategic shift for Facebook. The intent is clear--to keep people on Facebook longer, and to open up countless proven, search-related monetization strategies with all those businesses and services you like. Even still, Facebook has traditionally been more of a catalog of friends and family than a reliable means to expand social circles. Beyond the prey onCatfish, who among us is really seeking to meet new people on the service? Graph Search could change this limitation. Rather than attending a Meetup in hopes of finding friends with similar interests, those friends are, potentially, a search away from my social circle. Facebook could become the ultimate tool for social discovery. But there are a few design flaws that need to be ironed out first.
With the new power of Facebook's Graph Search, the social media giant has evolved into the ultimate snoop engine. What's clear is that many people have not factored an extraordinarily intrusive search engine into their decisions about what to confess on Facebook. You may be stunned by what you find: way too much information.
Oh, the things you learn on Facebook's new search engine! Among them: that the hardware chain Home Depot wins the top ranking among employers of people who "like" sadomasochism; that a lot of people are not embarrassed to profess a "like" of Hitler, but only nine of them reside in Germany, including one man with an apparently Muslim name who claims to work for NASA; and that abortion is prominently labeled a disease, and more than 6,000 people "like" it anyway.
You learn that some women call themselves the wives of men who call themselves single. That either a lot of people from conservative, non-English-speaking societies want the world to know they're bisexual, or they don't share Facebook's definition of being "interested" in people. That there is support for democracy in North Korea, but, on Facebook at least, it comes from one man. And that, yes, there are people from Chengdu, China, now living in central Iowa, and, yes, four of them are single.
Imagine the ferocious analytical horsepower of Google applied to Facebook's data: your pictures; likes and dislikes; when and where you were born; where you were educated; where you work; your religion, sexual orientation and political views -- though the engine searches only those things that you have chosen to make public (or, more to the point with Facebook, neglected to make private). The new tool is being rolled out slowly; after signing up some weeks ago, I recently gained access.
Even at its most basic, Graph Search changes the kind of thing that Facebook is. It converts it from a virtual coffeehouse, where you come to hang out with people you know, into a zone of discovery. For the first time, the vast universe of your nonfriends feels as real and accessible and interesting as your little galaxy of friends.
Graph Search can find you the Goldman Sachs employee (and, mind you, there is no fact-checking on Facebook, so these are self-authored identities) who likes the drinking game beer pong or who is in an open relationship. It can lead you to restaurants in South Africa favored by those who also like Amman and Dallas. It can, if this is your thing, show you pictures of Christians taken at the beach.
Playing around with the tool, what becomes clear is that many people have not factored an extraordinary, appetitive and curious search engine into their decisions about what to confess to Facebook. As Graph Search is more widely disseminated, a number of people may be stunned to learn how they can be found, as a man named Tom Scott argued last month in a Tumblr he created called "Actual Facebook Graph Searches," which received considerable attention.
The new tool makes it easy, for example, to find the names of people who live in Utah, "like" polygamy and are married. It's equally painless to find people living in Cuba who are fans of capitalism and Milton Friedman himself. It empowers officials in Uganda and Iran, where homosexuality is illegal, to look up which of their citizens are "interested in" members of the same sex. As Mr. Scott has pointed out, the tool would be very helpful to a Chinese official looking for family members of residents who "like" the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong.
These may seem like extreme cases. The perils for ordinary, uncontroversial people, though different, remain real. The discourse about privacy tends to assume that some things require sacred protection and other things are better disclosed than not. But much of the information circulating about you online is in an in-between category: obscure. Graph Search makes the obscure nonobscure, which is why the Web site GigaOM, after playing with the tool, quickly declared "the end of privacy by obscurity."
If Graph Search changes anything about how we live, it may be that it decisively shifts the burden of privacy onto you. It is now your duty to opt out of being discovered.
And yet the creepiness of Graph Search is matched by a less- heralded loveliness. It offers reminders, search after search, of how marvelously complicated this little planet can be. If our politics often devolve into black-and-white struggles, Facebook reveals that most of us live in the grays.
In digital life, as in life itself, people are multiple -- and yet, on the Internet, there may be less pressure to flatten multiplicity than there is at work or at home. You needn't just be a mom, or a human-resources person, or a Parisian. Graph Search points to a world in which you can be a Muslim and like the Web series "Old Jews Telling Jokes." Or work for an American university in Bangladesh and like the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. You can be Brazilian and like Argentina. You can admire Al Qaeda in Iraq and the rapper Eminem. You can be a gay Mormon. You can support abortion and still think that it's murder.
I know what you're thinking. Yes, stop reading and get thee to your Facebook settings -- before your Facebook settings get you.
On the other hand, are you suicidal, and do you want to signup for Facebook Graph Search. Click here: Sign up here.
COMMENTARY: Graph Search is still in beta, but those of you luck enough (or unlucky) to have been chosen to test drive Facebook's new search app, may or may not have used it long enough to understand its full potential to creep you out. You can blame yourself for most of this creepiness, since you, like so many of us, were only to eager to post messages, comments, likes and digital content on the giant social network. Now all of this is coming back to haunt us in the form of incriminating search results, which could make you look like a criminal, a perveyor of bad taste or manners, an outspoken revolutionist or hater of corporate America. If you think it's all fun and games, and willing to participate just the same, then you and only you are held accountable.
Courtesy of an article dated January 15, 2013 appearing in Fast Company Design and an article dated March 3, 2013 appearing in NewsFactor
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