Facebook to Become the Web’s White Pages
Posted by Nick O'Neill on September 5th, 2007 9:15 AMLast 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?
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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...
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