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Facebook Announces Social Search Tools
Today at a press conference in California, Mark Zuckerberg announced a big new feature from Facebook: Graph Search. It's a set of tools designed to quickly bring together social information involving "people, photos, places, and interests" in response to a user's query. Zuckerberg was quick to point out that they aren't indexing the web, and thus aren't challenging Google. However, it will use the vast volumes of data already stored on Facebook to answer questions like "What kinds of movies do my friends like?" and "Who are friends of friends that are single in San Francisco?" Addressing the obvious privacy concerns, the company said it wouldn't allow users to search content that wasn't already shared with them (or already public). The searched data does, however, include location data, if it's been shared — you can search by places your friends have been. Significantly, the official site also mentions that Graph Search will help you meet new people, something Facebook hasn't really highlighted until now. Graph Search is being rolled out as a limited beta, with only a few thousand participants. In the coming months, they'll open it to more users and continue working on mobile and non-English versions.
Additional levels of automated stalking!!!
No one can hid now
I'm sure this service will cost $100 or so to make use of. Good thing Facebook fully thought through their business model prior to going public.
When I've wanted to know what movies my friends like, I'll probably have already talked to them about it.
On Facebook, though, I've got "friends" who are basically just people I shared some period of time and space with - e.g. high school classmates. I don't really care what movies they like, unless they're members of the tiny minority with whom I've kept contact over the decades.
BTW this is the exact same logic that made me immediately turn off Google's "social" search results when they enabled that last year (in a previous attempt to revive the moribund Google+). If I'm doing a Google search, it's because I'm asking a question my immediate friends can't help me with.
#DeleteChrome
Is anyone outside of the teenage girl crowd even paying attention to Facebook announcements anymore? I'm legitimately asking. I have a Facebook account that I log into maybe once or twice a year. And most of the circles I spend time in don't really use it much anymore either. Am I the only one that sees Facebook announcements and just shrugs with indifference?
Facebook, search: all the dirty secrets my friends didn't navigate FB's privacy maze properly on.
Or potential employees.
I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends that've moved out of town. Every time they offer a "new exciting privacy feature" it changes my default privacy back to public (from friends only) and I need to redo all my security settings. Now it looks like anything I might miss gets slurped-up in easy to search format.
Fantastic.
What Facebook doesn't seem to realize is that my Facebook "friends" aren't really my friends - they are a large group of family and acquaintances. I don't think my taste in food and/or movies matches maybe 10% of my FB contacts. So if I do search for movies or restaurants my "friends" like, I'm not likely to get any better results than if I search Google.
Plus everyone I know would have to share a lot more information to make this service useful.
I think so. Do you?
I use my profile to bookmark (and share) waht I find interesting. The problem is, if I need to find something over 2 weeks old it takes forever to find it. Why can't I search my own profile?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The interesting thing I'm seeing is that the news is propagating via twitter and MSM. I haven't seen a thing about graph search on facebook itself...
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Someone should now sue Facebook from abusing dominant market position on social networks and we need to force Facebook to offer Google search, Google Maps and Google Music in Facebook site. Even a GMail is forced to be available for every Facebook user.
As when I am doing search in facebook, I am sure Facebook is directing traffic to its own services instead Googles.
CANT SOMEONE DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?!
Zuck said that Facebook spends 3 percent of their CPU power on privacy. With such a low CPU budget dedicated to something as important as users' privacy, it's no wonder they do such a poor job of it.
I read 10%, not 3%:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/15/facebook-graph-search/
What would you consider to be a more reasonable amount of CPU budget to spend on excluding search results from some queries? I'm surprised it's as high as 10%, but I never really thought of CPU usage as a metric for privacy protection.
Rather than blowing it away outright (which some of the comments have done), let's think about it for a sec. There's some cool stuff going on here, and then a big question.
The cool stuff is the technology and innovation. Think about this for a sec - Facebook's engineers are essentially looking at a variety of signals to determine (a) intent and (b) likely outcome. The signals are getting increasingly complex - not simply keyword boolean queries any longer - and, to me, that's a fascinating growth and extension of technology. It's innovation.
The question, however, is whether there will be enough value, simplicity and meaning to change user behavior from defaulting to Google to defaulting to Facebook or Bing. In my observations of search, for instance, I've seen young people search for Bing on Google simply to access Bing to perform a search. Our default to Google to answer questions of all forms and types is deeply embedded in our action and thought. Furthermore, search will have to prove itself valuable to all the searches not relevant to social graph: typically research questions, like "Who was George Washington?".
So, I applaud the innovation, and will await time to view change, through the lens of history.
--Dave
srsly. y u no morl?
on a side note, we can now better visualize some of the stuff that facebook knows about us personally.
They even got the BBC excited with the news of their news conference. Then the big announcement is this? Really? If it isn't going to turn into big piles of $$ for investors by this afternoon, they better have something earth-shattering coming in real soon. Right now they have a lot of shareholders who are nervous about how much money they lost in a hurry on opening day, and I don't see how this will help them (and I am most certainly glad to not be one of those investors).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
a friend snooping around your house when they're over.
this is simply another reason to stay away from facebook.
Technically, that would be "meta". ;-)
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Relationship status has meant nothing without knowing if they prefer bar or pie.
But there is demographic that likes to conform, do what the popular kids are doing, even though, or because, they themselves are not popular. The greatest risk in these people lives is to go an unpopular movie or have the wrong clothes. Ever since Facebook left the college culture, this has been the demographic that kept it going.
Of course, for many of us this is another reason to never create a facebook account. Another way for employers or stalkers or jealous lovers to make life difficult.
For those that want to be out there, there is always tumblr.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Don't kid yourself, 99.9% of these searchers are going to be something along the lines of.. "Girls with mutual friends who became single in the last month" "Single girls near me whose status contains 'drunkkk' more than twice a week" Combine this with imaging searching = awesome "Girls that have dated guys that look like me"
warning: your Facebook privacy settings have been reset
"And what if Facebook “accidentally” resets your settings, like what happened to thousands of users this week?"
It happens, often, to a lot of people. You're either lucky, or lying.
Cpu percentage is hardly meaningful. For example, my site uses 0 cpu on privacy, since it does not collect user data.
"Addressing the obvious privacy concerns, the company said it wouldn't allow users to search content that wasn't already shared with them (or already public). "
Translation:
"This is totally worthless without shared, public data, so we plan to completely fuck with our privacy settings a whole bunch before this rolls out so that we can make sure your data is public and shared."
but I never really thought of CPU usage as a metric for privacy protection.
It isn't at all unless it can be used as fodder for complaining about facebook privacy.
"Only 2.4% of the screen real estate is used for privacy controls! They don't care about privacy!"
How can 10% of a server farm go to that? if(notallowed(X,Y)) { etc
How is that notallowed() function written?
boggles my mind. Maybe I am alone and the Ubercoders at FB really can spend 10% of quality CPU time satisfying that func().
H.
irony... today my account closed after the 14 days;-)
I always thought their basic search features sucked to begin with. For one, it doesn't do well with finding alternate spellings of the same name and lately I've noticed that all three of the people filters (which in and of itself should have more than three) now don't limit their own lists. "Locations" will be intermixed with "Education" so even when looking up a school, you'll have 5 or 6 entries and it's hard to tell which one you're supposed to select. So if I try 4 spellings of a name and use all 6 of the different Education filters, they expect me to try 24 times to make sure all bases are covered. I personally don't use social networking so I might be missing something.
Want to know what kind of movies your friends like? ASK THEM.
Want to get set up with a single friend of a friend? ASK YOUR FRIEND.
Want to make Zuckerburg disgustingly rich? USE FACEBOOK.
Only if I can cross referances single girls of friends of friends who post less than or equal to 0 inspirational quotes with pictures per day (including but not limited to: jesus, them being a strong mom, something sappy about relationships, something about being a badass woman, what makes up a real man, their son and/or daughter and how much the love them, etc...)
Facebook: We find out how crazy some of your old friends really are!
How can 10% of a server farm go to that? if(notallowed(X,Y)) { etc
How is that notallowed() function written?
boggles my mind. Maybe I am alone and the Ubercoders at FB really can spend 10% of quality CPU time satisfying that func().
H.
Facebook processes more than 500TB of data a day, and has over 100PB in its Hadoop cluster.
Maybe a simple notallowed() function doesn't scale linearly across many PB of data.
Bing/Facebook FTW!
Facebook’s intent is really obvious – they are trying to replace “raw” Internet with the Facebook layer, and people would do all interactions: social, searches, shopping through their layer. This would render other companies like Google, Yelp, you name it obsolete. The problem however is in the details: how can anyone trust Facebook with their private data, searches etc. considering all the privacy issues, lack of user’s control over their data, etc.? Once you’re in the Matrix, you cannot unplug. That’s what Facebook is trying to bring to the users.
So instead of asking Siri questions I can type them into Facebook? This whole "event" was just so Mark Zuckerberg can continue parading himself around as the next Steve Jobs.
If you want privacy, don't willing share information on a public forum, like Facebook. Users are on the one hand using the site and all of its features, which presumably they find useful, and on the other bemoaning that the actions in which they publicly engage can be either aggregated or used by the company to - gasp - make money. Facebook has consistently responded to user privacy demands, or paid severely when they haven't (Instagram lost half its traffic in one month). As far as I'm concerned, they are an example of a how to balance user demands for privacy with monetizing a free service.
"parents learn about your kids life online"
Stuff like this makes more net-savvy FB users less and less open about sharing their lives online. FB's become the virtual equivalent of the mall, a place for the masses and not just some cozy hangout where you can gather with friends and let your hair down. Here the pressure to conform becomes great, since standing out means you have to be either the star or the oddball accosted by security: your parents or those "friends" of yours horrified by your unconventional opinion. When everybody chooses to just "like" whatever everybody likes, how useful will that information be to FB?
If you've got to perform a search to know which of your friends live in San Francisco, they're not really your "friends".
Maybe a simple notallowed() function doesn't scale linearly across many PB of data.
In a simple situation, you have a table or simple ruleset describing everything that is allowed, and disallow everything else. In that case, isallowed() is cheap. Or you might have a table of all the things that aren't allowed, which is dumb as a box of rocks but still cheap. FB must instead have rulesets where the operation of the rule depends on knowing the graph of relationships, and maybe also the provenance of the data which you're talking about (was it shared by route A or by route B?). Evaluating that sort of system is much more expensive, especially when dealing with as large an amount of data and number of participating actors as they've got; it's just the nature of graph closure algorithms. You can do some tricks which will make things cheaper I suppose, like precomputing limited closures and things like that, but it is still non-trivial as you have to deal with permission removal.
I try to avoid such complexity in my systems; keeping security decisions simple is a good thing where possible.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
"What kinds of movies do my friends like?"
I always just ask my friends if I have questions. It's called conversation and hanging out and it's what you do with friends. Fuck me right?
I know someone who regularly reposts and shares "activism" links, regarding riots in europe, pipelines in canada, and all those sorts of thing. This person has had their ability to post links and share those of others removed. No reason given. Guess their graph features were developed for that process and now it seems a shame not to make money from the idea.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.