Things Have Changed: Facebook to Open Public Messages to Search
Facebook began as a place for college connections, secluded from the prying eyes of the outside world, but today that era is officially over. Major Facebook investor Microsoft announced this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit that it has closed deals to bring status messages from both Twitter and Facebook into the search results of Bing.com. Twitter search is live now, Facebook is forthcoming.
Facebook is opening up to a search engine - that's very big news. Only content from accounts marked public will be indexed by Bing, but it's a sea change none the less. Facebook has an explicit, acknowledged agenda to make more people comfortable sharing more information publicly - once they do, that information will be searchable on Bing. This 'aint your big sister's Facebook anymore.
Facebook opened on-site search across user profiles and messages late this summer. The company has been careful to only expose information from people who have opted-out of their own default privacy settings and we don't expect this Bing deal to be any different. While some people like Facebook because of the privacy settings, a growing number of users like it for the promotional and networking advantages that can be maximized with a public profile.
You don't want to be public with your Facebooking? Facebook will respect that, but the company does hope you'll change your mind. Seeing some peoples' Facebook status messages show up in Bing search is likely to freak out people who aren't familiar with public profiles and have a strong interest in their own data remaining private.
Will the company make a similar deal with Google? Probably not. Twitter may have gone both ways, but Facebook's long-term ambition to challenge Google and its Microsoft backing will probably mean that the world's leading search engine will never be allowed to index activity on the world's leading social network. The public parts of profiles, yes, but activity? No.
Say hello to the new Facebook, now a partial player in one public part of the rest of the web.
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Now that's just a little too confusing. So if we close our profiles, are they still searchable? Are our old public profiles still searchable? I have been enjoying Bing and avoiding Chrome precisely because of the ownership/data factors; this changes everything. You're right; it's a huge deal.
A welcome move for public profiles but a little late to the game.
Facebook still is suffering from "Twitter envy" so I wouldn't think that a deal with Google is unreasonable as well. Just as Twitter has opened it's doors to both Microsoft and Google, I am sure that Facebook wouldn't want to miss out on the search traffic that Google could bring which, at the moment, is substantially higher that what Bing can offer.
We shall wait and see :)
Could be another growth factor for Bing. Do you know what percentage of FB users have set their stream as public ?
Great
So now if I use this engine, which is strangely my work engine, I will be exposed to a bunch of boring random garbage from boring people I don't know whippee. I'm sure the pedophiles will love it though.
Mike Griffiths
This is awful. If the point of Facebook was to make my status messages public I would just close my account and solely use twitter.
However, i find that two have their own place and uses. I don't see one competing with the other at all, as it stands.
Facebook has excellent privacy settings and knows that a privacy is the killer feature of the application. Compare the granularity of the facebook privacy settings to MySpace or Orkut.Also the details available through search engine would anyway appear to any digital stalker who would find it easy enough to create an account. As things stand today, putting a photo on Facebook is a little more safer than putting it in flickr ..
The Digital Litter is a serious problem of our connected life, but more than facebook, the search engines are to blame. The only way to avoid the loss of online privacy is active policing of ones digital presence. Easier said than done and great idea for a startup to make tools to allow active policing.
This shouldn't really bother people who have manually set their profile to "public" under Facebook Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Profile -> "Everyone" as they are already willingly sharing parts of their profile anyhow (Facebook allows for a LOT of fine-tuning there) - after all, if you don't want something about yourself out there you probably shouldn't post it as your status update in the first place.
It's interesting to see the potential competition of Facebook and Twitter to appear in search results and if one ends up with any sort of priority over the other.
does that mean that someone might come upon my inane twitter rants?
This certainly isn't small news, considering the move both Google and Bing are making to socialize search. I think Twitter will be much more effective in expanding their reach and becoming a fundamental part of that socialization, simply because Facebook has privacy requirements that will never allow them to be a completely open network with a revolving door. Love what's happening in the area of search :-)