Comments on: People Search Business Just Got More Complicated As Facebook Enters Market

By: Facebook: Open To The Public | A Media Circus

Facebook: Open To The Public | A Media Circus — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:40:05 +0000

[...] what does it all mean? To start, a lot of the new, people search engines, are going to be in trouble, but to be honest, that is of little interest to me. I am much more concerned with the implications [...]

By: Unit Structures – Facebook Public Search, New?

Unit Structures – Facebook Public Search, New? — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 14:39:03 +0000

[...] blogosphere is abuzz with news of public Facebook profiles, but what gives? This is old news. In June I wrote about the topic: [...]

By: Facebook Has LinkedIn In Their Crosshairs | K E K U [alpha]

Facebook Has LinkedIn In Their Crosshairs | K E K U [alpha] — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 13:29:47 +0000

[...] goes much deeper than one level of friends. You could, for example, use Facebook’s people search (which is now public) to not only find people, but see exactly how you are connected to them. In effect, Facebook could [...]

By: David Mackey

David Mackey — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 19:02:57 +0000

This is a good step on Facebook’s part. I’m excited to see how it works out.

By: Marie

Marie — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 23:32:18 +0000

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.

By: kt

kt — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 17:59:14 +0000

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.

By: Sally Anne

Sally Anne — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 16:44:15 +0000

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.

By: Steffen Ruehl

Steffen Ruehl — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 07:40:17 +0000

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

By: reflux

reflux — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 04:18:58 +0000

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.

By: Claude Gelinas

Claude Gelinas — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 02:46:14 +0000

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” ; )

By: Roman

Roman — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 02:24:55 +0000

Big time privacy issues. Especially with MySpace turning over their database for the purpose of tracking sex offenders.

By: steve ballmer

steve ballmer — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 02:09:23 +0000

For goodness sake, just use MSN people!

http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com

By: Lee Aase

Lee Aase — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 23:58:39 +0000

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.

By: G|oS|co

G|oS|co — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 23:15:41 +0000

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.

By: Dominic

Dominic — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 23:03:13 +0000

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.

By: Dan Birdwhistell

Dan Birdwhistell — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:27:45 +0000

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.

By: beach

beach — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:07:39 +0000

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.

By: Lizi

Lizi — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 19:43:47 +0000

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.

By: festiva

festiva — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:12:40 +0000

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!!

By: Lateefx

Lateefx — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:59:15 +0000

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.

By: Jim Fowler

Jim Fowler — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:55:00 +0000

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?

By: JayDawg

JayDawg — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:43:57 +0000

Philip Fung: Haha!

Rethinking your company’s policies right now?

By: snusearch

snusearch — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:30:38 +0000

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.

By: Techomical

Techomical — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:06:09 +0000

Facebook Teases Non-Users With Public Search Listings…

In an inevitable move, Facebook has added a feature that allows non-Facebook users to search for people within Facebook. This is not a huge surprise and could have even be expected if you look back at the Facebook messaging system…

By: dan farber

dan farber — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:54:46 +0000

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