
Graph Search's Dirty Promise and the Con of the Facebook "Like" - mtgx
https://stevecheney.posterous.com/graph-searchs-false-promise-and-the-con-of-th
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lukeholder
I say this all the time to my clients. Your end goal should not be more likes.
They are worthless. The goal should be more actual interactions with your app
or website or product.

The same goes for people focusing on getting people to click the big green
button on their homepage that says "learn more" which takes them to another
page (?!?). The buttons should encourage interaction and progressing that user
to use, experience, and depend on your product.

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PaulHoule
I dunno.

I don't use Facebook much these days except as a way to log in to other web
sites. I didn't have a day when I decided that "I hate Facebook", I just
drifted away.

My profile is full of all the anime I was watching two years ago. It's pretty
thin, and when you consider that it intersects with a population of friends
and family I knew 20 years ago, I don't know if anything useful is going to
come out if it, at least for me.

Some people might be in a more thickly connected part of the graph and get
better results.

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andrewdubinsky
Another issue with Facebook is that content is created for consumption by all
of your connections. It's social preening. It's what you aspire to be, but
wholly incomplete as a medium for search.

A few of the missing items:

-All the dirty stuff you won't show your grandmother. "Watch what you post" is part of raising kids today.

-What you fear. Do you post that you need an abortion or that you might have cancer?

-Gross stuff. Nobody posts that they have hemorrhoids. Or any number of things that you don't want girls you might date to see.

-Things we're ashamed of.

-Things that make us different. If you're a gun-toting neanderthal in SF or a gay man in the bible belt, you might not want everyone on facebook knowing that.

-Things the government will read. Reading revolutionary ideas, means of destruction, might be interesting and educational. However, posting on these topics or having a traceable record of them is a wholly different level. Think about prosecutorial misconduct.

I think FB will have a reasonable degree of success in search. However, it's
badly gimped.

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mattgreenrocks
The problem with Facebook is that it drags all the social bullshit that people
perpetuate into a larger forum.

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greenyoda
How many people actually care whether their friends like (whatever "like"
means) Coke or Pepsi? The most useful graph searches would most likely be job
or travel-related queries like "friends who live near San Francisco" or
"friends who work for Google". Such truly personal data will never be polluted
by advertising campaigns.

And if "friends who like Restaurant X" doesn't turn out to be a reliable way
of getting a good restaurant review, people will quickly stop using it. Or
they'll send a message to their friend to confirm whether they really
recommend the restaurant or they just liked it for a coupon. Eventually
they'll figure out which of their friends are reliable reviewers and which
just click on every "like" button.

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sazary
> The truth however is that the link between query intent and your social
> interactions for interests and places is much weaker than FB wants you to
> believe.

i must diasgree with this line. facebook is not the place that you could
search for a specialized query (for example algorithms or scientific data).
instead it is a place to search for people, restaurants and other day to day
subjects that people tend to talk about in daily chats, and they may share
links or write status about them in social networks. yes, maybe number of
likes is a bad measure to rank the results, but it definitely is a measure.

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liotier
Facebook increasingly feels like hanging out at the mall...

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bluegreenred
Even an ineffective Graph Search is still probably a net win for Facebook,
however. The ineffectiveness itself could be a kind of lure for less-popular
businesses who want more exposure (and perhaps have some interests in
appearing more popular than they are)... it doesn't fit every business, but it
is certainly a non-empty market.

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lifeisstillgood
But it _is_ a good bet - people I know are more likely to Use services I will
also want to use.

There is dirty data in there, but I would suggest the people who like coke to
get a token are the kind of people I will happily ignore recommendations from
anyway

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prof_hobart
But do you know why they chose to like something? With Coke, it's possibly a
fair bet that it was because of a competition. But for a local restaurant,
even if they've gone there and liked it, that could simply be because they saw
a "get a 10% discount on your bill if you like us on Facebook",

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lifeisstillgood
Its a simple catch-22 - a "like" has no downside cost to me, so I will happily
trade it in for 10% of my bill (Hell I wish more UK restaurants did this!)

However in the new graph search world (and indeed before this really) the
downside cost was that I am seen as a like-whore trading my affections.

The more facebook becomes real the more the cost of like will increase.

There will be a virtual rate of exchange - as indeed there is today. Some of
my friends tell everyone everything, some play their cards close to their
chest. I judge their recommendations accordingly. Somehow social graphs need
to do the same - and frankly that is pretty easy weighting really.

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prof_hobart
I'm still not sure how you (or Facebook) is meant to be able to tell the
difference between a genuine like and a 10% discount like.

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businessleads
It would be great if there was a new notification introduced: "Joe decided to
eat at Ray's Pizza after seeing you liked it." #notgonnahappen

