Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
Graph Search likely will not compete with Amazon product reviews. Graph Search will likely excel at local businesses and services -- find a good babysitter or car repair place in your local area?
That seems to be the area where Facebook is going in Graph Search, rather than product reviews as we know them.
Also, Facebook seems to be trying to become a dating and introductions service: "Find me friends of my friends who are women, local, and like to line dance." "Find me friends of friends of any gender who are local and like to ski." Or professionally: "Find me people in New York who know Hadoop."
The question of whether it competes may depend on how we define goals and competition, Mitch. In a goals sense, this has to be aimed at getting ad revenue for Facebook, and in some sense that will necessarily mean using a socially vectored information set to substitute for current product/service review channels, whether it's Amazon or OpenTable. If you get "better" recommendations with Graph Search then it succeeds with users, which makes it succeed with advertisers.
I hadn't thought of the dating-and-introduction angle (largely because I'm decades beyond dating, probably) but that would be a potentially interesting application and also a potential risk. I think that when you ask users whether they are comfortable having their profiles mined to suggest compatibility, you might scare some of them!
It's only going to be useful for those people whose friends post a lot of that kind of information. It isn't an equal opportunity resource, like Google Search.
I have Graph Search and I've been playing around with it. I found out that a restaurant I'm familiar with is liked by its owner. That two of my friends like Harry Potter books. My friends don't like any plumbers or babysitters.
But interestingly, trying to search for the latter, I discovered an app called Babysitter which was so keen to access my account it wouldn't let me leave the page. Hmmm.
Yes, that's key: Will Facebook users actually fill out information online in such a way that others find it useful. If nobody Likes a plumber's page, then Facebook won't be useful for finding plumbers.
Facebook constantly tests and tweaks its features for its diverse, global audience, paying close attention to the responses. The search tool, in its first iteration, answers queries by mining some of the data at the company's disposal, including photos, interests and likes. It will eventually mine status updates and other activities, from what users eat to where they hike. The introduction is especially slow, Facebook executives have said, so they can better test what works and what does not.
Honestly, Facebook search has never been useful for me. I never had the urge to discuss about this search issue with no one, so actually I have no idea if it's been useful to anyone.
Of course, there is always the possibility that FB search is great and I just haven't cared about it, and therefore it hasn't been useful for that reason. :D
I never had the urge to discuss about this search issue with no one, so actually I have no idea if it's been useful to anyone.
@Susan, I have never used FB search. Its hard to correlate FB with the search. I think it will take more time for the users to realise the true potential of such tools.
I am not sure if it's matter of time. I am not spending too much time on FB lately because from time to time I get bored from it. Maybe it works for someone who spends more time on FB?
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
50 billion household devices will be on the Internet by 2020, according to Cisco. And we're hearing foreign governments are hacking our infrastructure. Surely our refrigerators are next!
YouTube's move to a partial pay-for-view model could help relieve a dearth of good new content but it could also complicate debates in many parts of the world over payment by content providers for delivery of their material to customers.
That's what Larry Page said on Google's earnings call, referring to the conjunction of mobile and the cloud. Well, let's chart it then! We need to be thinking about an Internet where 90% of our traffic goes to 70 destinations within 40 miles of us.
EU operators are considering joining up to create a pan-European network to reduce competitive overbuild and cost. This might lower costs and focus operators on higher-level, more interesting services.
A recent release of the popular TweetDeck app for Twitter power-users gives new life to software that had previously taken a wrong turn. Here's a quick walk-through of the new TweetDeck, to show you why it should be at the top of your Twitter toolkit.
Twitter's changes are clearly aimed at being more Facebook-like, and this is because both companies are vying to serve the mobile social network market. But can that market work for anybody, given how difficult it is to push ads to social-update readers?
MySpace is reinventing itself by focusing on content, but it's too late, and other social networks should learn from its example by looking toward a telco payment model if they want to sustain user commitment and their own revenue.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
Apple may want to do a TV offering, but to meet its goal it would have to address three specific issues that have been exposed by earlier attempts to make Internet TV work.
The new UltraViolet online DRM model has people upset, but the question we should ask ourselves is whether we want a flexible model to harmonize content owner and content consumer rights, or a one-takes-all model that probably results in less online content.
A growing number of HR managers are suspicious of individuals who do not take part in social media and view them as anti-social in real life as well as online.
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