Facebook Opens to Search Indexing
|
Written By Kate Zimmermann | September 5, 2007 | Share This
|
|
This morning Facebookers logged in to the announcement that, “Starting today, we are making limited public search listings available to people who are not logged in to Facebook.” Facebook will begin allowing search engines like Google and Yahoo to index users’ profile names and photos. Though users are being given explicit directions on how to opt-out, the majority of Facebook profiles are expected to go “public”, like those of Myspace.com, by the end of the month.
According to the Facebook blog, the newly-opened listings will, “help more people connect and find value from Facebook without exposing any actual profile information or data.” In addition to names and photos, the listings will offer options to log in or register, send a message, “poke” a person, view friends or add to friends.
Though Facebook rightly points out, “The public search listing contains less information than someone could find right after signing up anyway, so we’re not exposing any new information”, the increased accessibility of names and photos may make some people uneasy. One of Facebook’s key draws is its relatively private network, such that, friend requests rarely come from strangers or spam profiles. The illusion of privacy created by Facebook’s current spam-free environment is one of Facebook’s strongest competitive advantages over Myspace. With “friending” options being made available like a click-to-call-esq personal advertisement, Facebook’s privacy advantage could quickly deteriorate.
On the other hand, search indexing will likely increase Facebook user registrations. As Om Malik predicts,
“This move transforms Facebook from being a social network to being quasi-White Pages of the Web. Every time a non-Facebook user finds someone on Facebook after a “search,” they might feel compelled to sign-up and get more information. It is a virtuous cycle, meant to attract more people to the Facebook network.
This development is going to strike fear in the hearts of entrepreneurs behind people-search startups that have mushroomed in recent months and have raised many millions in venture backing. It is also be a worrisome development for reputation-based systems such as Rapleaf that are creating profiles of people on the web. With the growing database of names, it is only a matter of time before Facebook rolls out a reputation system, and pegs it to an e-commerce engine.”
Hey wait a minute - didn’t the Wall Street Journal just report, “Social-networking Web site Facebook Inc. is quietly working on a new advertising system that would let marketers target users with ads based on the massive amounts of information people reveal on the site about themselves.”? Search-indexed profiles + Reputation filters + profile-targeted ad system… Could we be looking at a new kind of search advertising?
Topics: Advertising: Online, Search: Innovations, Search: News, Social Media, Uncategorized |
[…] Facebook Opens to Search Indexing » This Summary is from an article posted at Searchviews - Daily insights on Search Marketing, […]
[…] by Google, little to no value added for facebook, and zero value added for the end user. Big news indeed. And here I was all ready to go and generate 10000 profiles about my good friends “Billy […]
[…] now offer a classon Facebook App development, raising the bar for all new profile pimping programs; Google will begin indexing profiles much like MySpace; and Facebook has finally realized it’s place in targeted marketing with a […]