Just hours after we broke the news that Facebook had acquired FriendFeed comes Facebook’s announcement that it’s deploying its improved search product to everyone. This improved search functionality, which has been in testing since June, gives users the ability to search through shared media and status updates from their friends and the Pages they follow. And, perhaps more importantly, it lets users search through updates shared to ‘everyone’. The gloves are off — Facebook is going after Twitter where it hurts.
The new search will be a breath of fresh air to anyone who has previously tried to search Facebook for, well, anything. Under the old system, users had to browse through clunky categories to find their results, and there wasn’t a way to search though status updates or shared items at all. Now you’ll be able to simply click through different tabs on the left side of the page to jump between different categories, much as your would jump between Friends List on the Facebook News Feed. Another change is the way Facebook lets users ‘Search The Web’ — now these results are shown as a filter, rather than on their own page. And Facebook has also changed the search engine from Live.com to Bing, Microsoft’s rebranded and improved search engine.
These changes are especially important because search has long been one area where Facebook fell well behind Twitter. Twitter Search has become an amazing tool for finding the most up-to-date information on a variety of topics, including everything from breaking news to movie reviews. Facebook has slowly been making headway in this area by allowing users to share status updates with ‘everyone‘ (before that only your friends could see status updates). But until now there hasn’t been an easy way to actually search through those public updates, which made the feature useless to most people.
Now you’ll be able to jump over to Facebook search, click ”Posts By Everyone” and use it in much the same way you would use Twitter Search. You’ll see a list of matching updates from other users on Facebook, and a message at the top of the screen will update in real-time, alerting you as new updates containing your query come in.
For the time being it looks like Facebook isn’t promoting the feature too heavily — the ‘Posts By Everyone’ is the last item in the list of search filters, and I suspect that Facebook has relatively few users who are sharing their updates with the public in the first place. That will likely change soon though, as Facebook is planning to roll out a new suite of privacy options that will suggest that users begin sharing some of their data publicly.
Facebook’s 250+ million active users still dwarfs Twitter’s userbase, so even if only a small fraction of them begin using these new features, it won’t be hard for Facebook to become a serious contender in the real-time search race.
I’m still going to use Twitter search over FB search.
They should integrate the twitter results and give it its own twitter tab.
Great Idea! But will never happen unfortunately
Not working in India yet. What a time to market, this was announced 2 months back. Im loosing faith in fb engineering prowess.
Posts by “friends of friends” is missing in filters. That would be all about local news over worldwide news of everyone filter.
its on here finally, after a full day.
fb should set default privacy of status updates to “friends of friends”, so that when we search for everyone – most results will be from friends of friends. It will be more about local news than worldwide twitterlike everyone.
I guess Facebook should acquire some existing real-time search companies like http://www.boilingpage.com, http://www.twitturly.com etc . .. That would boost their fight against twitter.
Good idea Danny, I agree to it. Moreover there is no direct hit on twitter as far as I can see. I know it’s a good feature and sometimes FB left me irritated with its searches but even with improved search I don’t think so it would have an edge over twitter.
Twitter has its own market space and FB needs to do something entirely out of box to steal that market place.
Sonal Maheshwari
USourceIT your single source for all IT needs
Yada yada. If only twitter guys were not so friggin dumb. Or at least playing to be so. FB can do all it wants. One creative swoop by twitter could see FB members drop like dead flies.
How? Easy man. twitter become a FB but without all the ugly and silly problems currently associated with FB. Thus FB improved in ways beyond a Web1.0 or a Web1.5/2.0
Sounds silly, but there is more to it than that. Add Google in the mix and take it to another level. I do not mean Google search either.
This is really a retarded game. FB is actually looking like losers about now. Hey Twit brain, give the MF boss a call. And while you are at it FCUCK head, reactivate my fcucking twitter account bitch.
You are suggesting that this is a direct hit on Twitter, but while I do agree that ff has great realtime search capabilities and the team at FF is from Google with good experience, I think Twitter will not be taking this lightly. Just could be that they have something coming down the pike soon. While the games have begun, let’s wait to see what happens. This is business and is good for ff/fb but Twitter is in it for the long haul as well.
I might use Facebook to search real-time topics now.
holy shit this is an assault on all fronts!
remembering a good french war cry i read here:
RETWEET! RETWEET!
I’m not so sure users will suddenly jump off to Facebook’s real time search. Plus even though more links are definitely shared over Facebook, the reasons for that I think are different from that on Twitter (Closer, trusted network, coupled with possibly link previews). Unless Facebook provides some more functionalities to supplement real-time search, I kinda doubt if there’s a need for Twitter to worry about in the first place.
yeah, exactly, less spammers
Ah. I see your point.
I’m not sure if I read your comment wrong. But in my experience Twitter is a lot more spam prone than Facebook. Hence I dropped using Twitter. I just found it to be too annoying. Not to mention the trending topics are pretty retarded most of the time.
yep i meant facebook has less spammers.
What I find strange is despite twitter search being a powerful and compelling piece of functionality, it has very little onsite visibility for a logged in user.
Just made a similar point on the other article but I feel that users won’t want their data mined through APIs and FB search in the same way as they do on twitter. I believe people perceive FB as a closed, trusted network of friends and don’t want joe public to see their status updates
We will see I am sure but personally I share personal snippets about my life with my trusted network on FB and don’t want others to know this.
Twitter I share info my followers will find interesting/valuable, and most of these fall outside of my network of personal frinends. I’d happily have a million people on twitter follow my thoughts.
Are many people using twitter as a way to communicate personal info with their close network of friends despite the conversations being mostly open?
Are many facebook users having an open and personal dialogue with 500+ friends.
And will I share my twitter updates with my network of friends knowing that group of people has no interest?
To me and with my use, they just seem like very different environments from a usability, design, functionality and ethos point of view, and I believe they can live side by side.
How do you use these two spaces?
people change, slowly but they do. facebook is still bullish about publicizing updates but the usefulness of this will gradually become more obvious to users.
now if only they also allowed corporate accounts, it would be great
it’s not about people chaning. I *want* two different environments because I have *two* different aims. The nature of the update varies dependent on the space I am pushing it out to.
What value is there in the whole world knowing I got pissed last night, other than people that know me.
you can have that second environment if you have a corporate page, where you can post your company updates, it’s just like twitte, publicly searchable, people are able to follow you, and you can have many such profile. in fact, i mainly use facebook that way.
also, i ‘m pretty sure in the future fb will also implement an ‘everyone else’ option for sending updates. they are slowly but steadily incorporating the whole of twitter experience, and until now it has not alienated their users.
I see that, and kind of agree. Although I think twitter works better for my brand network – functionality and design wise, as well as the ethos, pace of updates and because it’s hyper connected and faddy environment. We’ll have to see, i’m too tired to articulate why.
There isn’t much value there — perhaps Facebook is working on a “personalities” feature in addition to their privacy controls?
An excellent point. Facebook is catered more towards personal use, I’m afraid its creators might try to forcefully transform it into something its not and end up alienating its users.
my twitter account is where i tweet about things my friends aren’t interested in, and i don’t care who’s following, but FB is where i have both friends & colleagues so it’s a little more censored
D
there’s definitely room for the both of em, but to be honest, i’m not really too fond of FB – it’s gotten too big, too ambitious.
Now I can run a search to know if my ex-wife is attending my best friend wedding party
Its very obvious that FB is going after Google not twitter. Google should be really scared…the most important thing currently in search is being able to include real-time data in results. Friendfeed have been the leader in real-time data and they have been able to innovate faster than everyone else… I blogged about it at http://feedingm...ot-twitter.html
+2 for the comment. -1 for plugging own blog.
Net: +1
Eh, why should Google be scared? I don’t use Google to find stuff one would expect to find on a social network. I use it to find information. Usually on subjects that are highly unlikely to be found on a social platform such as Facebook (stuff related to linux, php, mysql, programming, etc).
I second @bor opinion. Google scared? LOL!
Page, Brin and Schmidt should be sh*** their pants now.
Is it my imagination or FB has been unable to monetize ads or apps or anything?
‘FB going after Google’: sure, to search about tons of useless boring personal postings. Get real, Google is a real tech company…
I only regret FriendFeed has been swallowed by FB, just to lose its independence and become another feature.
Get real,
Yes. If only I had search access to when Suzy said “OMG” to Kimmy. That would change everything.
There’s a reason I wear my headphones on the bus.
If Facebook can develop a culture or trend where it’s users post useful links or information and current topics then it might be interesting to use but still not that threatening to regular search.
Google should be scared when Facebook develops a way to post commercial and business related information and form business and product/service related clubs and relationships. So far they haven’t done that. Why? I have no idea. Maybe they are working on it. But that’s when the real advertising dollars are in jeopardy.
Good read.
I didn’t know about it. But personally, for getting information and for “share” and “share alike” — Twitter is way better than FB IMO.
More serious folks who tweet almost non-stop about the ‘issues’ and trends.
FB is more geared for the personal, rather than the professional. And by professional, I mean newsworthy information and networking in real-time at its finest.
Let’s play ball..
Google to acquire Twitter next?!
do you think anyone will be interested to acquire twitter after this?
Facebook improves search
http://facebook...ora-la-ricerca/
Seems not yet rolled to all users.
Will it have an API?
My user on FB has been in the “everyone” beta group for the last couple months. It was not really very useful to publish to everyone before today…..
Now with the everyone search feature there is a reason for people to share to “everyone”. Now there is more of a reason to broadcast your thoughts as there is a community discovery capability.
But the real value in that discovery is the ability to subsequently engage with the creators of those post; facebook is not about that like twitter is. It seems keen but ultimately rings incongruous with facebook’s core values.
Maybe Facebook will add more engagement opportunities? Time will tell. For me most of my professional network uses Twitter, but I work in technology and that is expected. Most of my social and lifetime friends are on Facebook and over the last year more and more of those people have started using social media. I expect to use both Twitter and Facebook and just would like more opportunity in Facebook to share and discover more openly.
I am not really sure how it will work. What will they show under real time search? Will they show users status updates? if Yes then what about privacy? I think it will be difficult to implement but lets see FB will surely have some solution for it .
At first it’s a compelling story. On second blush, meh. Facebook users don’t care for this; they’re there to share little innocuous snippets amongst their closed circles. Facebook = homogenized.
Twitter, on the other hand, is about the open dialtone. Chaotic, valuable, full of shit and full of diamonds in the rough — just like a real global conversation should be.
Facebook has the users and the wallet; unfortunately, they seem to lack the vision at the moment.
It means users can search their desired things on facebook.
in my experience facebook is more effective than twitter. but it’s weird why this social network is getting famous.
I find Facebook to be far too buggy/glitchy. Their pages load slow, lock up and have constant errors. Currently I run an ad through their ad program, even that is glitchy. I have been trying to pause it for 5 days and their system will not let me. So I have been paying for an ad against my will for 5 days now!
I signed up with Twitter before Facebook, and in my experience Twitter has far fewer problems. I’m not real sure why people put up with the terrible Facebook service. I’m about done myself.
It’s great to see some real competition hotting up to fight with Google for search. Bing has made a decent impact and now both Twitter and Facebook/FriendFeed are going headlong after realtime search. Great stuff.
Without seeing exactly how it’s being implemented, it’s hard to comment. From what I’ve read, I am not hugely convinced that it’s the big shake-up that some people seem to be implying.
hmm this is interesting.. im anxious to see what develops..
FB kinda annoys me for some reason.. Twitter is just some how easier to deal with, + better information.
problem: they removed all of the filtering power previously available in profile search. this makes it less useful for facebook’s primary use case — connecting to people — in favor of trying to mimic twitter.
facebook should worry more about serving its own users than taking twitter’s. they aren’t the same user base.
It’s about time. This seems like such an obvious play for facebook. Based on the addictive nature of facebook, and the popularity of status updates among it’s users, it seems like real time search through facebook will easily become a dominating force in the space. If this is played right and promoted enough, facebook will be the leading contender in real time search. Twitter, step up your game. This should be causing some serious concerns.
Twitter is crack addictive for those already on it!
I hate people who use FB updates like twitter updates. It is just soooo much noise. Who has time for it all? Keep FB on FB and Twitter updates on Twitter.
i hate people who post updates at all. call me on the phone and tell me what you’re doing or i don’t care
Is anyone having issues with the new search NOT showing up? Facebook is notorious for their worst in class customer support and lack of good discussion forums with help moderators so I am having trouble finding a resource to ask this question.
The person sitting next to me has the new search up and working, but for me it doesn’t come up.
I always thought that Facebook was more of a tool to connect with friends and be part of their social life. Facebook was never a tool for the real time search for news – i hope Facebook doesn’t go in that direction as it will loose out on its unique proposition. Facebook is for friends, and twitter is for everyone else!