Facebook launched 'Graph Search' today to a limited audience. An accompanying video shows how wonderful and complete our life will be once we all use it.
FB's search has always been dismal and this just opens the search up to be at least more accurate, but also let's not forget it's main goal to have wider capabilities for advertisers to be more selective and targeted in knowing what you did last summer, what you ate for breakfast or what brand of cereal you like.
Riveting stuff, especially for stalkers, but gold for advertisers.
It has it's benefits for businesses to selectively target, but everything with facebook comes with a price for an organisation's brand and reputation, and more often is a higher reputation risk than other channels.
Strategically FB wants so badly to be your Google replacement, it feels like it would sell it's soul (if it had one) but just lacks any any trust from it's users or charm in becoming so. I strongly believe this will push a sizeable majority to further lock down their personal profiles from their search reach, and push a large chunk to it's competitors to twitter, G+ etc. That said many wont notice and onwards it will roll.
In truth it's not all that different from what other search and digital companies want to do with your data, but there is a way to do it, and facebook just seems to do it without any sincerity or integrity for me.
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