Search: Another way for Facebook to steal Twitter’s thunder?
Facebook’s search feature, to date, has let you search for friends’ names, or use Microsoft’s search engine to search the web. Now, it’s beginning to test out ways of searching information from your friends, from Pages you’re a fan of, and from anyone who has made their content publicly available. In the company’s example, you could search for “Iran” and see the latest from your friends and from anyone else using Facebook to publicly discuss the turbulent events in the country.
More, from Facebook:
With the test, you will be able to search your News Feed for the most recent status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan. You will also be able to search for status updates, posted links and notes in Search from people who have chosen to make their profile and content available to everyone. As always, you can control what content you’re sharing by editing your privacy settings . . .
Facebook regularly says it’s trying to make its service more open without exposing user data that people want to keep private. The company is sometimes viewed as trying to be more like Twitter — although I think that comparison misses some key differences between the two services.
In this case, for example, Twitter offers a valuable near-real time search engine for its service; people are using it to find the latest news on all sorts of things, including political events in Iran. You can make the argument that Facebook is trying to do the same thing here. The problem, if Facebook is trying to make a real-time search feature to compete with Twitter, is that most people have their accounts private; Facebook has constantly encouraged this by defining itself as a service for sharing personal information with your real-life friends. And the amount of data that Facebook can search for you is limited by that fact. Lots of people are talking about Iranian politics on Facebook, but with their real friends and not the public — so Facebook can’t let you search for what they’re saying.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Facebook might start encouraging people to have “open” profiles, as some hear. More open data means more to search, and a more useful search engine.
But I’m not convinced Facebook is trying to copy Twitter per se (even people on the Twitter vs Facebook bandwagon acknowledge that Facebook is also copying lifestreaming service FriendFeed). I think it’s more a matter of Facebook trying to borrow some features that Twitter handles well while recognizing the differences between the two services.
For example, in March, it moved towards a more Twitter-like homepage design that emphasized status updates over other information, with the key difference being that you were sharing status updates with your real friends on Facebook, as opposed to your sometimes-random followers on Twitter. In the redesign, the central “stream” on the homepage became an unfiltered stream of status updates. Photos of your friends, events they were attending, and other information was stuffed into a right-hand column called Highlights. Now, as the company confirmed to us on Friday, it is in the process of becoming less like Twitter and more like its old design, by re-integrating photos, events, and other “Highlights” information back into the stream.
So Facebook might want to be more open in some ways — and open search could be one of them — but it seems to be recognizing and building on its differences from Twitter at the same time. To phrase it another way, Facebook wants to be the more private, real-life version of Twitter, pre-loaded with key applications like photos and events — but just open enough to make things like search more valuable.
The problem, for Facebook, is that this balance may be unattainable. Twitter’s open, real-time search looks set to be a more comprehensive way to find information. Which, in terms of money, means Twitter could make more than Facebook through search from things like Google-style keyword advertising.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.
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