Facebook’s search has been found

With “Graph Search,” Facebook’s newsearch engine announced Tuesday, the world’s largest social network has finally begun to index a trove of Big Data that’s been piling up for years. Even Facebook probably doesn’t know what’s been deposited in by its 1 billion members. Suddenly there is a way to find out. 
For all its popularity, Facebook has lacked something that could be described as “purpose.” For co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, sharing isn’t a platitude ‑ it’s world-altering. As he once said: “By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.” Yet Facebook is, for the most part, fun and games. It’s also, in the opinion of some, including me, a Faustian bargain that gives the company valuable information with which to make money, and its members the ability to do things they can do any number of other ways. 
For all the information Facebook members share with one another — pictures, opinions, “likes,” preferences, the companies and celebrities they follow — none of it has been searchable. So if you have friends who like science fiction and live nearby, you wouldn’t have known it (unless you, you know, knew it), and that Avatar movie night wouldn’t have happened – or, worse, would have happened alone, like always.
The sum of all that information makes it much more valuable than its parts, not only to Facebook but also to its members. That’s why Graph Search makes Facebook membership an entirely new proposition, compelling not just because of some raw network effect ‑ all my friends are there, so I have to be ‑ but because you can now be discovered by strangers who can do things for you, like offer you a job.
This new relationship could go a long way toward tempering privacy concerns at Facebook, which maximizes sharing and minimizes discussion of sharing’s pitfalls. I suspect the vast majority of Facebook members are blithely indifferent to the extent to which their lives are open books, even as they do things on the larger Web, not realizing they’re being logged on Facebook. It’s pretty clear that Facebook’s members largely don’t care about the consequences of a privacy breach until it happens. 
Graph Search may be just the gentle persuasion Facebook members need to seriously manage their privacy settings, and thus give Facebook more cover in the privacy tango.
And if profile management becomes a more rigorous pursuit, then Facebook’s internal search transforms Facebook into a more professional-oriented site. “Facebooking” yourself may replace “Googling” yourself as the gold standard in vanity search, if only because you’ll be more concerned about seeing yourself as others see you. Your social life would become more compartmentalized to a small circle of confidants — Graph Search is designed to respect individual privacy settings — while you give your professional identity, and all of its poise and polish, more prominence. 
Facebook with Graph Search could remain a playground for the college crowd while giving grown-ups a bigger reason to stay and share even more about themselves. And now it needn’t be a deal with the devil but a collaboration, where the payoff is simple and direct. You wouldn’t just be the product anymore, fodder sold to third parties, but a full participant in a market made and facilitated by Facebook. 
By virtue of making information more manageable, Facebook transforms itself into a lifetime social network whose members were hooked as teenagers. It’s a reason to become more engaged ‑ suddenly there is a purpose.
Graph Search is still in limited beta release, so it will be some time before the competitive threat to Google or the business-focused social network LinkedIn (where I am a consulting editor) can be assessed. Share prices in both companies fell after Facebook’s announcement Thursday. Yelp also got hit, on the theory that better awareness of restaurant recommendations on Facebook might weaken that service’s appeal.
It is the nature of technological disruption that a company eventually comes along and finds a way to elicit actions that were waiting to happen but didn’t have an outlet. As Wired‘s Steven Levy puts it, “The mark of a trans formative product is that it gets you to do more of something that you wouldn’t think to do on your own.”
With the development of Graph Search, the irony of Facebook’s own timeline continues. Once the most exclusive private network in the world, it’s now the biggest public network the world has ever seen. And after years of prodding, cajoling and tricking people into sharing, Facebook is finally sharing back.

PHOTO: Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg introduces a new feature called “Graph Search” during a media event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California January 15, 2013. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

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Pope blesses Twitter, Facebook to spread Church teachings

Pope Benedict XIV urges Catholics to go forth on social networks and multiply the church's messages of faith.

The pope endorses online social networking as a means for spreading the message of faith.

The pope has friended the online social networks in a big way.
Pope Benedict XIV, who only recently joined Twitter himself, is calling on his followers to use social-networking sites such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest to spread their faith to nonbelievers.
"The challenge facing social networks is how to be truly inclusive: thus they will benefit from the full participation of believers who desire to share the message of Jesus and the values of human dignity which his teaching promotes," the pontiff said in a message delivered on the 47th World Communications Day. "Believers are increasingly aware that, unless the Good News is made known also in the digital world, it may be absent in the experience of many people for whom this existential space is important.".

In an address titled "Social Networks: portals of truth and faith; new spaces for evangelization," the pope said online social networking was creating a public forum that fosters discussion and debate that "can reinforce the bonds of unity between individuals and effectively promote the harmony of the human family."
However, the pope cautioned that the "culture of social networks" posed a challenge to those who want to discuss "truth and values," warning that the din of celebrities and marketing threatened to drown out the message.

At times the gentle voice of reason can be overwhelmed by the din of excessive information and it fails to attract attention which is given instead to those who express themselves in a more persuasive manner. The social media thus need the commitment of all who are conscious of the value of dialogue, reasoned debate, and logical argumentation; of people who strive to cultivate forms of discourse and expression which appeal to the noblest aspirations of those engaged in the communication process.

The pope joined Twitter on December 3 and quickly had a following of more 187,000 people the first day -- more than a week before his first scheduled tweet. About a month and half later, he counts 1.4 million followers, well behind the 33 million following Justin Bieber, perhaps one of the celebrities the pontiff was speaking about.
(Via Venture Beat)

 

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Facebook Chief to Hold Fund-Raiser for Christie

Mark Zuckerberg likes Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.

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Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has found an unlikely ally in Mark Zuckerberg.

So much that Mr. Zuckerberg, a co-founder of Facebook, and his wife will hold a fund-raiser for him next month at their home in Palo Alto, Calif.

The fund-raiser is another reminder of the hurdles Democrats face in attempting to defeat Mr. Christie, who faces re-election in November and is often mentioned as a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

Mr. Christie has increasingly tried to position himself as a kind of crossbreed politician, apart from the partisan politics that plague Washington, and able to appeal to a constituency beyond the Republican Party regulars. He took leaders of his own party to task this month when they failed to call a vote on a relief package for victims of Hurricane Sandy. His popularity has soared since the storm, even among Democrats — and apparently among at least some tech donors in Silicon Valley, where political contributions tend to flow toward more liberal causes.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Zuckerberg, who is the company’s chief executive, said he and his wife admired the governor’s work on education policy — Mr. Christie has pushed for vouchers, championed a new state law weakening tenure in public schools, and signed a contract with the teachers union in the state-run Newark schools that will allow performance bonuses. He also signed a law requiring teachers, among other public employees, to pay more toward their pension and benefits.

Mr. Zuckerberg showed his interest in education with a $100 million donation to the Newark schools in 2010. But he stood alongside a Democrat, Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark, as well as Mr. Christie to make that announcement. And he has made few political contributions — federal records show only a $10,000 donation to Facebook’s political action committee.

Mike DuHaime, Mr. Christie’s chief political consultant, said the two men met in 2010, before Mr. Zuckerberg’s pledge to the Newark schools, became fast friends and have kept in touch. “Governor Christie was instrumental in giving Mark the confidence that the money in Newark was going to be used wisely,” Mr. DuHaime said.

“I think it demonstrates the kind of broad appeal that he has and support that he has, and part of it is taking on education reform. People took notice that the governor stood up and did the right thing.”

The Democratic Governors’ Association, which might be expected to dispute that characterization of some of Mr. Christie’s education policies, started an online petition Thursday calling on Mr. Zuckerberg to cancel the fund-raiser for “right-wing Republican darling Chris Christie.”

Mr. Christie has raised more than $2 million for his re-election, and announced that he would opt not to take public matching money for the primary, which would have required him to limit spending in the early stage of the race to $5 million. Some Democrats have said they need to raise close to $50 million to beat him. The only declared Democratic challenger so far, State Senator Barbara Buono, has raised about $250,000. (Mr. Booker, who was considered a favorite to challenge Mr. Christie, announced his interest in running for Senate in 2014 instead.)

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