Yesterday, people were speculating about what Facebook was working on. Then today, we found out it was a search thingie: you can search for which friends have certain interests, or have been to certain places. Or you can search for, say, which TV shows your friends tend to like. I was pretty disappointed with that. Ever since social networks became an important technology, there's been talk about how some company could somehow use them for searching, and kick Google's ass. So Facebook is going to have another go at that idea. Technologically it seems pretty sophisticated, but I still don't see people getting much use out of it.
If you're talking about searching amongst your friends, well, I already know them, I don't need a web site to do that for me. In the introduction event, Mark Zuckerberg himself gave the example of searching for which of your friends are fans of Game of Thrones. True, I don't know precisely which of my friends that would be, but I can take a pretty good guess.
On the other hand, if we're talking about searching amongst the huge network of people on Facebook around the world, then privacy concerns are going to put the kibosh on that. Or if this is aimed at people who have thousands of "friends" they barely know, that searching among them is of limited use.
I wonder if this is a result of all the young people who don't understand today's technology. No, seriously, hear me out: I grew up without the Internet, when an almanacs were a huge repository of knowledge. Once the Internet went mainstream, we were all shocked by just how much information there is out there that wasn't previously available. If you're asking me whether to search the whole world, or just the part of it that my friends and I have experienced, I'm going to pick the former (no offence.) Perhaps a deeply connected person who's grown up with deeply connected friends may not appreciate their limitations.
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