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Facebook Moves into ‘People Search’

I’m not going to spend much time on this now. Danny Sullivan covers the announcement in depth and so do TechCrunch and Battelle.

Basically people not on Facebook will be able to find Facebook profiles in search results unless users make those profiles private. The default setting is “everyone” (total access). It’s an effort to leverage SEO to drive more traffic to Facebook (and revenues, later buyout offers).

LinkedIn has done a version of this for awhile so it’s not an unprecedented move but it has significant privacy implications (as does all of people search). It’s time for people to become a bit more sober about what they’re sharing and what they’re holding back.

This entry was posted on September 5, 2007 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Social search/community, User-generated content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Facebook Moves into ‘People Search’”

  1. David Dalka - Creating Revenue and Retention - Chicago GSB MBA Says:
    September 5, 2007 at 2:42 pm

    Facebook Spamming Your Identity in Search Results to Drive Their Traffic – Part 2

    I wrote about this issue back on May 18th when I removed my public listing. This is not a new feature today as is incorrectly being reported. It is Facebook announcing something that they should have announced back in May when I noticed them doing this…

  2. AhmedF Says:
    September 5, 2007 at 5:14 pm

    Yep – first thing I did was remove all public access.

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