1 post tagged “online”
Facebook is starting beta testing of new search functionality that covers pretty much everything posted by your friends and pages you are a fan of (basically anything that could appear in your feed).
It also covers everything published by anyone who has a public profile or page. This is huge. This is not only functionality that will be very helpful for the individual casual Facebook user, it will be of immense help to folks who are using Facebook as a research and promotions tool for their cause or business (or meeting their story deadline). They will finally get something more akin to Twitter search but covering the diverse content of FB (Photos, notes, posts, and comments galore!)
Admittedly, search will still be limited by privacy settings, but that is neccasary and does not much dilute this huge step forward.
ONe side effect I can see is pushing folks to establish both a public (marketing) profile and a private (personal) profile so they can have publicly searchable content for the whole community to see. I'm on the fence about this but leaning against (and which Facebook strongly discourages...mostly by deleting accounts). I'd say, stick with a page for that sort of thing...
(As per usual, they announced it with a random blog post by an engineer at 9:30pm the day before.)
This can't be fully rolled out quickly enough, in my opinion!
I'm hoping they open up public search outside FB (and not just to Microsoft as per one of thier last search partnership deals). This would make the business and research side of this functionality even more desireable.
(My friend and colleague David Erickson at the e-Strategy blog, has been pining for this for years...so if anyone can get him in the beta...right after they get me in...there will be a bag Twizzelers in it for you...the big bag too...with the ziplock!)
