Zuck Doesn't Get Search
Facebook already gets billion search queries a day "without really trying," he said, mostly users looking for people or content on Facebook. But Mr. Zuckerberg said the ambition for search is bigger. "Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to deliver answers; what sushi restaurants have your friends visited in New York, and liked? These are queries you could do on Facebook that you couldn't do anywhere else."
He conceded that the company has been slow on product over the last six months as it reorganizes developer teams to focus on mobile, but he said that the pace would begin to accelerate, including a new Android app.
"People underestimate how well we are doing in mobile," he said. "We already see that mobile users are more likely to be daily active users than desktop user."
Message to PandaWhale: "We already see that mobile users are more likely to be daily active users than desktop user."
That's not a brilliant insight.
PandaWhale is 0.00001% the size of Facebook and that's true for us, too.
Not brilliant nor impending, but really really real. And it's your market to grow.
You're welcome -- please change the title so we can find this convo again to something like "Zuck mentions Facebook Search" ...
You can change the title by clicking on it. :)
What Zuckerberg fails to understand is that I'd rather have the opinions of EXPERTS -- Zagats, Frommers, food critics for major papers -- than listen to all the people I'm connected with on Facebook.
Users are looking for content on Facebook because ability to find things on Facebook is next to impossible.
But looking for things others have liked? No way. That's just noise.
I hate it when you're right, which is always. Zuckerberg sees potential, just the wrong potential?
Zuck is amazingly non-adaptive. He just can't let go of this idea that non-social actvities can be made social by virtue of exposing data more and more data about people on FB.
It started with Beacon, and when the public showed it didn't want Beacon Zuck started trying to bring it back in different ways, looking for a way to make people accept it. Online shopping is not social. Looking for restaurants and auto mechanics is not social.
There are only a few cases where you want to query your social graph for information, but it's usually going to be a question like "What is everyone doing this weekend?" rather than "What's the best Peruvian restaurant in San Francisco?". Looking for new music may be somewhat social, but the way they've implemented music "discovery" on FB is to spam you with every crappy song any of your friends are listening to right now.
To me it really seems that Zuck insists that "social search" is useful primarily because the social graph and Likes are the only data he has, and, frankly, he seems to have only a second-hand understanding of how real people interact with their friends; it's as though he has a sociological theory based on studies in college and watching television shows about people who have friends.
Facebook search is useful for finding profiles of other FB users, but for 99% of searches, traditional search will always be better because it searches the entire web, and isn't restricted to the data your 300 or so Facebook connections happen to have already shared on FB.
Zuck's thought process goes something like this:
Gee, half a billion people are searching for things on Facebook every day. Maybe we should do something about that.
He's not proactive anymore.
Gone are the days where he'd roll out a visionary change like the News Feed.
Instead, it's all trying to keep up with what users are already doing.
"People are using Facebook on mobile? Maybe we should make a Facebook Mobile app that doesn't suck...
@lucas, I was reading your post and agreeing 100%, but then I just realized I did do a social recommendation activity. I queried a well traveled group of people on a tech list I frequent for recommendations for sites to see and places to eat at in Baltimore and NYC for my wife. They came back with some really good suggestions.
I'm not sure how often I'd do something like that as I can only remember doing something like that half a dozen times in my lifetime--the last time just happened to be yesterday.
I can't see listening to my friend on Facebook either. My "standard" of friend jumped the shark long ago. Even though FB gives me the ability to group some of my friends and has a "close friends" button now, it's long devolved into people I might have known in high school, some random ex-colleagues at all the companies I've worked at, lots and lots of random relatives, a few famous people that I might have interacted with once or twice.
My LinkedIn connections I guard with my life, but even then about 15% of them I should clean out, but don't for professional reasons. I think LinkedIn Open Networking (LION) was one of the worst things to happen to LinkedIn, so much so that I created an anti-LION activist group.
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Purists-antiLION-1657347?trk=myg_ugrp_ovr
(Yes, I didn't let anyone join). ;-)
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are like background noise.
They're useful for an occasional address book lookup but not much else.
These are the services I find myself using more these days: PandaWhale, Reddit, Tumblr, Imgur, YouTube, and 9gag, and to a lesser extent, Blogs, Pinterest, and Quora.
Yes all these services are noisy too but since they're organized around INTERESTS more than PEOPLE it's easier to drill down to something I do care about.
People are noisy. Interests are interesting.
So is the future of Facebook nicely curated Pages and Fanboys? All that supported by communication add ons like chat and voice?
I have to believe there's something more than that bleak future.
The future of Facebook is as a sign-on for all of your mobile apps. They'll quietly watch what you're doing, then interject at the right moment with things you might like to buy or try.
I always try to login with twitter wherever I go, but they don't cover as many apps as openfeint, facebook, or google.
Investors are DYING for Facebook to build decent search.
I always thought a smaller, more compact version of quora for fact-based knowledge would be useful. Gordon's latest project is based on a "love of information minamalist info."
He's got a nice slide set about it here. http://infinithree.org/
Instead of chunks of data, they have slightly longer than a tweet "thunks" of data in Thunkpedia.
Something like that would cover about 40% of what I use search for.
http://www.slideshare.net/gojomo/infinithree-beyond-the-wiki-encyclopedia-9929947
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