Facebook Graph Search
Facebook Graph Search allows you to find, using natural language, just about anything that Facebook’s database of people can hold, and narrow results down by specific categories like music, places, photos, video games, and more. With Graph search, you can perform alot more human friendly or social searches around your friends or community or interest. For instance you can search which of your friends like playing piano or which ones like to go to restaurant X. Such searches are obviously a complete paradigm shift from the web links and queries that Google returns. The last time I tried out searching on Facebook, I got nothing close to what’s been promised because it has not yet rolled out — still on the waitlist. The service has since been overly hyped by the media and Tech pundits including he Wall Street Journal which called it a “direct competitor” to Google while CNN reported that Yelp’s stock is down following the announcement. But this sort of service that has taken this long(since Jan) to launch or roll out certainly can’t be a “Google killer App”. It’s still loading….
Facebook NewsFeed
Then early Match, Facebook Newsfeed which is perhaps the social network’s most ambitious endeavor as it involves a complete overhaul to the website’s user interface partly inspired by mobile. Newsfeed is designed to be as Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it ”the most personalized newspaper,” which got me very excited. We’re told that the service is being rolled out in phases starting with a few people. Just like graph search, i joined the waiting list and am still waiting. It’s almost a month now since its announcement and still waiting…
Facebook Reply button
Then came the “Reply” button. Facebook announced on Monday, 25th March that it was rolling out a new feature so users can reply directly to comments left on their page. This means that, instead of having to leave a response to a friend’s comment way after new ones have been added, like its long been with commenting systems on the web like Disqus, you will be able to address each individual comment. I just checked my Facebook Newsfeed, but I can’t “Reply” to my friends’ comments yet! Facebook has been known to iterate through its products frequently and swiftly, but why isn’t this happening? Is this the inertia that comes with companies growing big that they now start playing it safe (you could also say overly cautious) as they become more and more risk averse?
