Facebook had the world waiting for its news yesterday.
There was interminable hyperbole about what the announcement would bring.
Facebook was preparing to conquer the world of mobile.
Facebook would finally be introducing a mobile phone.
Facebook was going to send a coding team to Mars to write a search engine for Martians.
That last part I made up.
But hey, why not? Everyone else in the world was conjecturing what was the primary topic of the looming announcement.
Being a marketer, I was caught up in it like everybody else, and also just as much in the dark.
Which was kind of the point.
There's no question Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken a few pages from the Steve Jobs "secrecy in marketing" playbook.
Announce you're going to have an announcement, be as positively vague as possible, and then wait for the speculation onslaught to begin.
In the end, it was all about search, which has for Facebook's short life been one of its more miserable capabilities, so in that respect, the news was welcomed.
Facebook was going to fix its search capability, allowing its users (albeit initially in a limited beta) the opportunity to search their Facebook social "graph" across a range of functions: people, pictures, interests.
The fact that it took two displaced Google engineers to come into Facebook to build this function adds only a wee bit of irony to the equation.
I, for one, immediately went and asked to participate in the beta, though my invitation will likely loom ignored in Zuck's inbox for some time.
In the meantime, I will wait impatiently for the opportunity to go out and search my high school Facebook sub-graph to discern, once and for all, the most popular band during our golden years. (My money's on AC/DC, but Pink Floyd might give them a run for their "Money.")
Or to discover, via the serendipity that is inevitably going to characterize Facebook's search graph, that Austin still largely prefers Uchi (in South Austin) to Mushashino (off Mopac) for its finer sushi, although the latter is always a good escape valve for the Uchi unagi lines snaking along South Lamar.
Or to find out that Facebookers around the world who root for the Chelsea Blues pretty much detest anything to do with Manchester United, with the exception of one person on the planet (me). I like 'em both, but perhaps that's just my attempt to pick two winners to try and make up for the recent massive deficit left by the wandering Dallas Cowboys.
No, much of this I already know, and Facebook search will simply be my new vindication engine, confirming the best and worst I thought of humanity in one fell graph searching sweep.
I just wonder if the new search graph is going to tell me something I don't know.
Excuse me while I run over to Google to see if I can find out.
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