Many years ago, when I introduced the world to the concept of MyTop, I mused of a portal which you would never leave. You would run your life from within its walls. Facebook has always been the closest thing to MyTop. Indeed, those early MyTop posts talked of a Search function so you wouldn’t have to leave to go to Google. The tie up between Facebook and Microsoft over their Bing search has never really caught on.
Tonight, in an ‘Apple-like’ launch event, we were all meant to get really excited about Facebook’s Graph Search. Basically this is a feature that allows you to search the Facebook universe that your friends have created. But only if they have such lax privacy settings that they allow you in. Also to make it work, you need thousands of friends. Eg “Where is there a good restaurant in Birmingham’ would only work if I had a few friends there who had recommended such eateries. I don’t and I can’t recall any of my Facebook friends ever recommending a restaurant anywhere! Another example used is searching for photos of your friends taken in, say, 1998 in the hope of finding something embarrassing. Although my friends are perfectly capable of doing embarrassing things, they are also wise enough not to post them on Facebook.
So I am decidedly under whelmed by all this. Facebook shares are currently down 3%.