Over the last year or so, I have been intrigued by a concept I call "knowledge networking". I have written a bunch of posts on the topic and define it as...I never finished that last paragraph and now it looks like I don't have to. Yesterday, Facebook disclosed that they have begun limited testing on a new version of Facebook Search. The details can be found here but most importantly in my mind, you will be able to search on the contents of your News Feed (i.e., all of the updates made by your friends). I believe this will be very powerful.the ability for people to connect with the purpose of leveraging each other's knowledge. This is different than social networking where people connect with the purpose of communicating with each other.Most of my perspectives have been about the role knowledge networking would play in the business world but there is also a place for such a concept in the consumer world. For example, if I was thinking about going to Costa Rica for a family vacation, wouldn't it be nice if I could easily find all of my friends who have already been there? This type of capability is being called "social search".
Recently, TechCrunch published an article entitled, "The Future of Social Search (Or Why Google Should Buy Facebook)". The article talks about the potentially powerful combination of Google's search capabilities with all of the "social" data Facebook has (a la News Feed). I agree this would be a powerful combination but I question why can't Facebook do much of this on their own by enhancing their mediocre search function.
I continually get frustrated with Facebook's search capabilities.
So to go back to the example I used earlier...if I am thinking about going to Costa Rica for a vacation and wanted to find out who else I know has been there, I will be able to do a search on "Costa Rica" in my News Feed and any update that mentions it will be shown in the search results.
It's not clear when Facebook will roll out the new version of search to all of its users but I am very excited about its potential.
2 comments:
I think Facebook should review its social search as it is confusing and an optimized selection option must be implemented so that users may choose a specific type of search
Hi Perry, great post. With the massive amount of data they collect daily, I think they could surpass Google search based upon relevancy for a large percentage of queries. From family vacations to college applications to mechanics and more, the idea of FB taking on yelp and Google is pretty exciting. I'm on FB way more than Google and I'm more closely connected with the FB experience so recommendations from Google have less influence. Too much to post here but there are great possibilities for both players.
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