People Search Business Just Got More Complicated As Facebook Enters Market
Michael Arrington
51 comments »
Facebook just announced that they are now allowing public searches of their users by people without Facebook accounts.
Not much information is included in the results (see image below)- just the name and primary photograph included in the user profile, and users can easily elect to stop search engines from indexing their information by changing their privacy settings.
As Om Malik notes, this is yet another competitive threat in the burgeoning people search scene. We’ve recently covered five new people search engines - Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou. All of these services count on the fact that people information is distributed across many different websites and services.
To the extent any one service such as Facebook (or LinkedIn, etc.) gather lots of centralized information about a large group of people and then make it available for general search, these people search engines become much less important. If these startups were public entities, their market valuations would dip today.
so you can type in somebody’s name, and the result is…somebody’s name, and a thumbnail? i guess that’s useful if you need a thumbnail of somebody, which happens about once every…never.
having a facebook account, i’m not sure how much i like this. i’m going to read more about the security policy and contemplate whether this is good for me or not. I agree with gilltots that it is very random when i need to do a people search.
I don’t think Spock will be hurt by Facebook’s move. The privacy and security issues will tip the scales in favor of the solution that truly grants most value to the users. Why wasn’t LinkedIn mentioned in the article?
Oops, just saw it. Sorry…
The new web model!!
Create a HUGE audience and then do everything you can to destroy your relationship with them! Serve them non-relevant advertising and continue to jeopardize there privacy. This makes so much sense.
Come on now.
testing
All you have to do is switch off your privacy setting. People need to calm down.
Duncan - couldn’t agree more.
These types of new features should be turned *off* by default. If they want users to turn it on, then they’d better give some good incentives to do so.
This is *not* new news today.
I turned this “feature” off in May when they actually started this as is evidenced by my different message in my login panel today.
http://www.daviddalka.com/crea.....ic-part-2/
Test
I agree with Duncan and Tara. If they want to release these new features, perhaps a bit of warning and retaining current privacy settings by default would be the way to do it. Releasing new features like these, changing people’s privacy level, and then going “oh, by the way, we are doing this now” is really not the way to build or retain trust.
Duncan,
Why do you think Facebook is worth eight billion? Personally I don’t give a damn about the privacy of my users. If I could stab my college friends in the back for a buck then then who are the Facebook users anyway? Just digital images. I don’t have to give users a darn thing Tara. I am just looking to cash out through an IPO next year.
mrkzuckerberg@yahoo.com
Good move by Facebook!
What’s all the hooha about privacy? If all they are showing is a thumbnail pic of mine and my name, I don’t see a privacy issue. If anything, for an employer doing some background check on me, he will have to add me which puts me in much more control.
Now all facebook needs to do is introduce a professional profile and kill linkedIn.
This is a brilliant move. Millions of searches on Google daily for people’s names that now drives people to FaceBook which will drive registrations to FaceBook, more traffic and thus more revenue. These guys have there heads on straight.
Mike to say facebook is now in the “people search” category is truly a stretch. Basically any closed social network that allows you to search its member base by first and last name is a people search, so Friendster was really the first people search engine.
Spock is certainly a people search engine, since they pull information about people from around the web into search results. However, WikiYou and facebook are not since we do not pull information from the web about people to populate results.
Duncan,
Why do you think Facebook is worth eight billion? Personally I don’t give a damn about the privacy of my users. If I could stab my college friends in the back for a buck then then who are the Facebook users anyway? Just digital images. I don’t have to give users a darn thing Tara as long as I grow traffic. Then I cash out through an IPO next year.
mrkzuckerberg@yahoo.com
Jay, you have to be kidding to compare Facebook with friendster. The level of authenticity an average facebook profile has is no where near the second-grade social networks like friendster. There is a very clear and huge difference between facebook and everyone else. This comes from someone who has been on facebook for couple years now.
Hi Michael,
Facebook is getting controversy. You know what they say on the showbuz: …as long as they talk…
This is like a the yellow pages. You have the choice to be listed or not. Soon the debate on privacy will be gone and the service will be in place.
Two good things: the service and the publicity.
Note: The guy pretending to be Zuckerberg is not funny nor smart (Duncan is not writing this post).
Mario Ruiz
@ http://www.oursheet.com
I think Facebook has learned a lot from their controversial release of the news feed feature in the past. I am sure with this search feature, they will provide each and every user with the ability to choose what the public can see and can’t. I think it is a good move especially to advance the facebook platform. They need to be able to work with external applications.
-Guna
Facebook is a garbage site………..period. People are so gullible.
You know a site is going downhill when they make news. It’s one of the first steps.
Just look at MySpace…
The big question is, when will Facebook become so popular that it is uncool. FB is far and away the best social network but college kids are very anti-establishment. When this becomes seen as too mainstream, how long before it is uncool and the college crowd flees for some other thing. That is why I think they should cash out now while they are on top
Please get my picture off your website.
Thank you.
this is kinda pointless and not worth the posts its getting. Everyone is liking to have a facebook account and therefore can do this search anyway.
So lets face it this is a lets keep us in the news type of feature much like some company launching something in secondlife.
Wait a second. Doesn’t giving public access to Facebook information make these people search services even MORE useful, since they now have another resource to draw upon? My understanding of the space is that these services consolidate your identity across a number of services for one touch point. Facebook is a long way from doing that.
People search sites like Spock will be differentiated from Facebook search. Facebook is what you choose to share about yourself. Spock crawls the web to assemble a portrait or dossier based on publicly available data, and could include Facebook data. I would expect Google/Yahoo/MS to offer similar people dossiers in the future. Of course, it is slippery slope as to where it all ends up…between the cameras watching every move in large cities and search engines knitting together dossiers that will ulimately be able create a kind of social graph like mapping your invidual DNA
Facebook and these others are great and all but who needs them when you have snusearch.com
http://www.snusearch.com/
A simple, low budget site to find people.
But I’m glad facebook is opening up even more.
Philip Fung: Haha!
Rethinking your company’s policies right now?
Ohhhh, how evil. This sounds like Facebook is going to try and copy Jigsaw.com now. How come you don’t view this as EVIL Mike?
I hope that the the Privacy settings on my Facebook profile actually function. Cause me and many others will not be happy to see the profile preview pop up on Google.
My Facebook page is a space where I network with my own close network - hopefully they continue to afford Facebook users the option to be indexed in Google. If not, I’m quitting.
Why don’t they just list subscriber names only with some maybe, preselected brief info? And any other person who searches has to submit an application through the site to the subscriber in question for further permission to release the full profile.
This should compromise the desire to connect & for privacy.
Just a thought!!
Why just sharing the name and last name?
I think they should extend it by adding important profile information such as : age,gender , looking for etc.
this is great news for Wink and the other true search engines of people. The more names the better. If you don’t want to be found, just turn off public access. If you do want to be found, you’re fine. Google is the biggest winner though. They know how many searches are done for real names, this will only help their corpus. Google has a tough time determining a person from any other object, so when given a known structured source like facebook or linkedin (or Wink if google ever gets their act together), then they have a vertical search just waiting for them to flesh out.
I think you all are missing a couple of points:
1. This is a mechanism by which they hope to sign more people up to Facebook. They don’t want to dominate the search engines. LinkedIn has long had public profiles that appear in search results, but these limited profiles don’t tell much typically. And it’s a great mechanism to get people to sign up, but it’s also a way to get people to sign up who won’t actually use the site.
2. Facebook has been doing this for quite some time. As far as I can tell, they enabled public search of those members who downloaded and placed “badges” on other sites. The pages that people were taken to then listed how many photos, notes, etc. the person had and gave myriad options for action. The current model is stripped down, and encourages sign-ups only.
3. What Facebook ISN”T telling us is if they enable the search engines to crawl the full profiles in order to yield more significant search results. For instance, let’s say we query “Michelle Simmons”. That applies to 94 people on Facebook, though I highly doubt that Google et all will serve up all 94 as separate entries, etc. LinkedIn and others solve this by serving multiple entries on single pages on the homesite. But the key question is still if I type in “Michelle Simmons” and “Harvard” and “Tennessee” if the Michelle from TN who went to Harvard pops up above all others. If this is the case, then FB needs to disclose this.
I will say it again…gullible. No one seems to give a shit about privacy. It’s like, here I am, here is my whole freakin life. Do with it what you will. Do none of you people care that you will be turning your whole life into a digital file? A lot of things happen to people in life. Some of it good, some of it not so good. I have this feeling millions will wake up one day and read something about themselves they had long forgotten, and there it is, it all it’s invasive glory. Suck it up idiots. You betrayed yourself.
It’s not just Facebook but every single social site out there.
A few problems
1 - Facebook is cracking down on 3rd party apps that advertise themselves to a users friends without a users permission … yet … facebook does this itself … if you get invited to join but dont … the next person who enquires about inviting you … will get a message saying that you are already a member … so they then add you to their friends list … and you get another message … saying “so n so added you as a friend” or “so n so just wrote on your wall” even though you have not signed up …
2 - So when you do a public search for a user who has been invited but not signed up … the results will show them as already a facebook memeber … even though they are not.
I have written to facebook before.
1 - Once to ask about video upload limits. They immediately increase the limit to allow more video to be uploaded. Very cool.
2 - When I wrote to them about the problem above … they basically said they knew about it and would take it under advisement.
Of course this is how social apps spread … right or wrong is another matter.
Concerns are way overblown. I think it will actually fuel faster growth in Facebook as people run across listings in Google, but can’t contact the person without signing up for an account. If Facebook is growing by 1.2 million people a week now, it will be 1.7 million a week by October 15.
For goodness sake, just use MSN people!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Big time privacy issues. Especially with MySpace turning over their database for the purpose of tracking sex offenders.
With social networking (not just Facebook), privacy is going out the window!
Then again, lots of people can create virtual “misleading” identities to cover their tracks so I guess it’s going to get very interesting in the coming years.
“Social” now goes hand in hand with “worldwide” ; )
Nice one http://snusearch.com
I think I’ll use that over the others.
…and the recent searches feature, beautiful.
Though I have to admit, I am addicted to facebook.
Hi,
I miss the point: facebook is a proprietary and limited data collection. People search engines (you missed http://www.yasni.de) use public data. If facebook now makes its data available 4 public then our search will include it - and much more (so its more in every case). Of course on facebook itself is more detailed data of people who sogned on there (but only 4 these people and only data people entered by themselves). We encourage our users to sign on there to find out more - because our result only is a teaser(so its a benefit for facebook as well)!
Why people searches should be harmed by this fact?
Best
Steffen
This may be ok for some people but what about the people you don’t want contact with. Enemies, your boss, ex’s….. It may seem ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ to be on MyFace (whatever) but think of your life 10 years from now. And once on Google, always on Google. Your information will be permanently ‘out there’ in cyberspace until the day you die and beyond.
In response to #17, Friendster has 3 patents on the inner workings of the connections between users and their ability to control their privacy settings.
You might not be able to find everyone because it looks like the “facebook search” function is “case sensitive”. Let’s say you are searching for “lastname” but typed “Lastname” you won’t find it and vice versa.
This is a good step on Facebook’s part. I’m excited to see how it works out.