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This at least exposes what you could have been doing all along using their API. If anything it is better that they launch this and people realize the implications rather than developers being able to do it without people really understanding the implications.
I understand why it took them this long to come out with something like this. For this to work, you need massive amounts of data, something Facebook has plenty of after receiving a firehose of data for so many years.
Google has failed in social search, because (ironically) they had the search first, but not the data. IMHO this is exactly what they were afraid of and the main reason why they keep pushing on G+ hard.
Most importantly, Graph Search finally "captures the intent" - which made Adwords so good - that FB Ads was badly missing. Expect to see their revenues soaring in the coming years.
This feature has rolled everyone, by default, into a dating service ("Single females in San Francisco who like Radiohead") and a marketing database ("People under 25 who like Coca-Cola"). This assumes that the advertisers didn't have access to searches like this already. That seems very unlikely.
Marketers have certainly been able to do "people who added our app who are x and like x" queries for a while. The only difference is that ordinary people can do it with their friends and no obscure query syntax.
Just so I understand this correct, if everyone is only sharing things explicitly with friends or friends of friends, doesn't that render the open social graph search useless?
This can't be said often enough.
I personally hate Facebook because of Zuckerberg's disregard for Steve Jobs's definition of privacy: to know what you've signed up for.
But there's definitely a lot of utility for those who willingly hand over their personal information. It's a trade-off, and I'm fine with it, as long as people knowingly, willingly accept that.
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Right, I just don't get why Facebook had a huge rollout for a feature that provides very little, if any value to users, and tons of value to advertisers. It really says a lot about where they are as a company IMO.
Maybe because they don't really have any exciting, innovative products on the horizon for consumers, and that's the best they could do right now.
This feature has rolled everyone, by default, into a dating service ("Single females in San Francisco who like Radiohead") and a marketing database ("People under 25 who like Coca-Cola"). This assumes that the advertisers didn't have access to searches like this already. That seems very unlikely.
Did they have access to this, or did they have access to "show my ad to everyone who matches this query" ? I don't see why Facebook would allow advertisers to build databases of people when they can just force them to go through their own tool and keep people anonymous, like Google does. Also, this is free, as opposed to advertising tools, which broadens the audience quite a lot.
By the way, you can click through the "create an ad" process quite far on facebook before you have to actually pay for it, so for those curious, why not give it a go and see for yourself what the process looks like? :)
I really like it. The constantly increasing social pervasiveness is inevitable and I've made my peace with it a long time ago. I understand why it took them this long to come out with something like this. For this to work, you need massive amounts of data, something Facebook has plenty of after receiving a firehose of data for so many years. Google has failed in social search, because (ironically) they had the search…
You say that as if the competition was a specific event with a discrete ending time, rather than continuously ongoing process that ever ends.
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I think it's quite different for a company to use "creepy details" to deliver targeting advertising than it is to make that information available to the public in an easily discoverable fashion. Graph Search is really interesting from a data standpoint, but I don't at all see how it's going to mesh with the realities of how people like their data to be managed.
How can you feel about clicking on an Ad that matches one interest of yours if you don't know the additional targeting criteria? The more specific the criteria, the more likely the "advertiser" is a spear fisher. I can think of a couple exploits (Err- links) one might pay to send to "groups" like: All Oracle employees who like sailboats and tennis. All Universal Health Care employees who like Oracle. All apple employ…
So for a query like "All Oracle employees who like sailboats and tennis", they check to see that the person has shared each of these facts with you, and only shows up if everything checks out. It's possible for you to be friends with someone who is an Oracle employee but they have only shared their employer information with a select group of people which doesn't include you. So they would not show up in that query you make.