8 Comments »Last night Facebook opened up a new feature that allows individuals (and search engines) to publicly search Facebook users. This is an interesting step by Facebook. While you already had a publicly available profile, users now have the ability to see if you are on the site even if they are not a registered member. Facebook is giving users a month to set their privacy settings to enable or disable this feature.
Personally, this doesn’t strike me as much of a surprise. Many have discussed Facebook becoming the people search engine. The only problem with this search is that unless you register, you are limited to the first three pages of results. I’m not quite sure how useful that is but I guess it’s a start. Om Malik thinks that “this is yet another small step in the overall erosion of personal privacy.” What do you think about Facebook’s decision to add public search to the site? Are you any less likely to use Facebook?
The Facebook public listing will show your name and picture. That’s it, for now anyway. I would venture to guess that the vast majority of readers here (and at gigaom.com) already release far more than that to the world via blogs anyway.
This is all much ado about nothing, IMO.
I think the real issue here is that Facebook has totally blown the illusion of exclusivity that they had with the site. It was mortally wounded when they opened up the site to the world, and now it’s six feet under with the announcement that they are in essence actively seeking search engine traffic. It’s just another people aggregation site now, though one with a lot of good features.
Of course, good features can be replicated and improved upon by somebody new…
[...] something that they should have announced back in May when I noticed them doing this. Some bloggers seem to have gotten this part totally [...]
The Facebook public listing will show your name and picture. That’s it, for now anyway. I would venture to guess that the vast majority of readers here (and at gigaom.com) already release far more than that to the world via blogs anyway.
This is all much ado about nothing, IMO.
I think the real issue here is that Facebook has totally blown the illusion of exclusivity that they had with the site. It was mortally wounded when they opened up the site to the world, and now it’s six feet under with the announcement that they are in essence actively seeking search engine traffic. It’s just another people aggregation site now, though one with a lot of good features.
Of course, good features can be replicated and improved upon by somebody new…
No big deal, you can turn all of this off. Though there is a large number of privacy settings which gets a bit confusing.
Concerns are way overblown. I think it will actually fuel faster growth in Facebook as people run across listings in Google, but can’t contact the person without signing up for an account. If Facebook is growing by 1.2 million people a week now, it will be 1.7 million a week by October 15.
[...] for their customers, who are looking for them). Other reasonable analyses are here, here and here. Many of the objections raised today are the standard response of those who see a privacy threat in [...]
Concerns are way overblown. I think it will actually fuel faster growth in Facebook as people run across listings in Google, but can’t contact the person without signing up for an account. If Facebook is growing by 1.2 million people a week now, it will be 1.7 million a week by October 15.
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