Ok, I'm biased because I'm a search guy but for some reason I get more creeped out by people inventing new ways to track down other people than I do about people inventing new ways to connect someone to a product sale.
We've heard from people trying hard not to be found because it doesn't "add value" to them if that person some high school they had such issues with lost track of them.
I certainly agree though that the information Facebook has could really inform a search product. We (Blekko) did an experiment using Facebook likes from your friends to inform results rank. The results were pretty cool when you searched for a seafood restaurant in SF and the result said "250 of your friends like this place." That can give you a sense that people you know (and possibly invest a bit more value in their opinion :-) thought this restaurant was good, as opposed to people on Yelp who you do not generally know.
A lot of hate for graph search going on but I am pretty excited.
> photos I like taken in New York in 2010 - great way to find something again without filtering through activity log or remembering (all the) details
> friends in Austin, Texas - because _people move_ and I travel
> friends who like ultimate frisbee - I meet a lot of people and play a lot of frisbee, it would be stellar to have an auto-populated list of friends (not just the regulars) who would be down to play
> friends who like Book of Mormon - who should I be asking for a recommendation?
> people who going to event X and event Y - now we can carpool
> people in group X and group Y and group Z - similarly
> Stephanie who went to Mike's event and is friends with James - use case from below (that I encounter about once a month) of trying to find someone with a sparsity of details.
I can't think of any way to (nearly as easily) get this information without graph search, and frankly I think it's awesome.
I doubt I'd use it for any of those reasons, but I guess it doesn't hurt to have the search there. Just like outfitting your blog with a search function, this improves the usability of the site a bit, but I'd hardly think it would be a very big profit maker for Facebook. On the other hand, if it helped you reach out to people you don't know for various reasons, maybe to find a language studying partner, people to play sports with etc, that would be more useful. It would also be perfect for businesses when they want to find and target messages to a certain audience. The only problem is, I doubt very many people would like to share their information with anyone outside of their friends, I sure don't.
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A nice disparaging comment of a years worth of work for a supposedly 100-person team but you have to at the very least acknowledge this is certainly in the realm of "hasn't been done before" and "no other company can do it."
I expect this will turn out to be a big deal, though it will take time. People comparing it to Google are missing the point. It's the same fundamental hypothesis of a domain-specific semi-structured search engine like W|A, but I'm much more confident Facebook needs such a thing more than the world needs W|A.
One of the use cases in the presentation that stood out to me was finding people you met at a party. Let's say your friend Chris introduced you to some girl named Stephanie, and all you really knew about her was that she went to Harvard... simply asking the graph search "Friends of Chris named Stephanie who went to Harvard" should give you a manageable list to sort through to friend them, rather than all 1 billion Facebook users.
Unless I have a connection with a lot of Stephanie's that went to Harvard, that should already be a quick search. Improved search is useful, but this was an incredibly hyped up event. Being able to find basic stuff from your friends should have been something you could do all along, I'm not seeing what the big deal is.
No, I wanted to do this on the weekend, instead I looked through three people's friends list and didn't end up finding them. It took a while, with this it wouldn't take a while.
I think I'm glad I deleted almost all my photos from Facebook last week. All I left were a couple of dozen mobile photos, and I deleted all the albums from when I was using FB for photo sharing a few years ago.
We've heard from people trying hard not to be found because it doesn't "add value" to them if that person some high school they had such issues with lost track of them.
I certainly agree though that the information Facebook has could really inform a search product. We (Blekko) did an experiment using Facebook likes from your friends to inform results rank. The results were pretty cool when you searched for a seafood restaurant in SF and the result said "250 of your friends like this place." That can give you a sense that people you know (and possibly invest a bit more value in their opinion :-) thought this restaurant was good, as opposed to people on Yelp who you do not generally know.