Facebook gives us a peek (and Cat Face 4)

There-there. Thursday's IT Blogwatch: in which Facebook open the search engine kimono. Not to mention Cat Face meets Gordon Ramsey in Heck's Kitchen...

Linda Rosencrance notes the news:

Facebook Inc. today said it is changing its social networking site to make the names and profiles of its members available to nonmembers and eventually accessible through search-engine listings. The change means that people who are not Facebook members will be able to search for friends or others by typing their names into a search box on Facebook's home page.
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Users who don't want their listings to become public can opt out by changing their Search Privacy settings. [more]

Facebook's Phil Fung has details:

Starting today, we are making limited public search listings available to people who are not logged in to Facebook. We're expanding search so that people can see which of their friends are on Facebook more easily. The public search listing contains less information than someone could find right after signing up anyway, so we're not exposing any new information, and you have complete control over your public search listing.
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In a few weeks, we will allow these Public Search listings (depending on users' individual privacy settings) to be found by search engines like Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc. We think this will help more people connect and find value from Facebook without exposing any actual profile information or data. [more]

So what? Om Malik ponders:

This move transforms Facebook from being a social network to being quasi-White Pages of the Web. Every time a non-Facebook user finds someone on Facebook after a “search,” they might feel compelled to sign-up and get more information. It is a virtuous cycle, meant to attract more people to the Facebook network.

This development is going to strike fear in the hearts of entrepreneurs behind people-search startups that have mushroomed in recent months and have raised many millions in venture backing. It is also be a worrisome development for reputation-based systems such as Rapleaf that are creating profiles of people on the web. With the growing database of names, it is only a matter of time before Facebook rolls out a reputation system, and pegs it to an e-commerce engine.
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Think broadly however, this is yet another small step in the overall erosion of personal privacy, thanks to the ever growing popularity of the social networks. I don’t like the direction where all this is headed. [more]

Michael Arrington agrees:

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. [more]

Is Soso Sazesh surprised? Sort of:

This is not a huge surprise and could have even be expected if you look back at the Facebook messaging system upgrade that allows users to email their friends who aren't on Facebook. This too seemed like an opportunity to get use from Facebook without actually registering for an account, but that wasn't really the case. It's no different with the new public search listings. When you arrive at Facebook's welcome page, there is a search field that will allow you to search for your friends without signing in to an account. [more]

But Scott Gilbertson's not worried:

Opening up Facebook profiles to searching also means the big search engines will start indexing them as well, which some Facebook users may find alarming.

But Facebook’s search plans are fairly restrictive so you needn’t worry too much. If you’d like to hide your profile from the new search you can do so in the preferences under privacy settings. Facebook is giving users one month to make the changes. Interestingly I haven’t received any notification about the changes outside Facebook itself.

If you don’t change your privacy settings the search results will still only return your name and profile picture. And even that will only be visible if you’re over eighteen. Still, despite the the fairly tight restrictions, there is no doubt that this is a move away from Facebook’s once restrictive privacy policies. [more]

Danny Sullivan raises his hand:

Um -- This Isn't New! ... I remember signing-up for Facebook before this announcement and seeing an area within the privacy settings allowing me to expose my profile to search engines or not, if I wanted. So this is new, as Facebook claims today? I don't think so.

Indeed, Tom Critchlow at Distilled wrote about these options being live back in July. By the end of the month, by linking to his public listing using his name as the anchor text, he found that listing at Facebook ranking well within Google. Then by early this month, it was no longer ranking. He pondered whether Google was penalizing Facebook listings. [more]

Tom Critchlow takes a bow:

It could mean that in a couple of weeks Facebook are going to be implementing some kind of internal linking structure such that these public profile pages actually rank in Google. Wow. They took my advice! (or stole my idea, whichever you prefer! [more]

Buffer overflow:

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• John Monaghan: Learning how the organization operates
• Preston Gralla: Looking for porn? Try a .gov site
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• Douglas Schweitzer: China in the news ... again
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Previously in IT Blogwatch

• Microsoft mourns loss of ISO votes (and math jokes)
• Please look at our ads: they pay the bills (et les cowboys)
• Muni-Wi-Fi crashes and burns (and old-ad 'shopping)
• Vista SP1: coming soon...ish (and burning meme)
• Is the gPhone coming in 2007? (and 2001)
• Older posts

And finally... Cat Face in Heck's Kitchen

Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You too can pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk. My mythical editor hates Tom Stoppard.