After a cryptic news release from Facebook advising of a ‘mysterious announcement’ caused a flurry of tweets, blogs and water-cooler speculators to mull over (Nixing the dreaded ‘timeline’? Selling more ‘lucrative’ shares? Adding more features?), Mark Zuckerberg announced a new tool called Graph Search today.
“Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected. The main way we do this is by giving people the tools to map out their relationships with people and things they care about,” read a statement from Facebook camp. ”We call this map the graph. It’s big and constantly expanding with new people, content and connections. There are already more than a billion people, more than 240 billion photos and more than a trillion connections.”
Basically an internal search engine, Graph Search is designed to sift through your social data and answer questions like “Which of my friends live in Toronto?” ”What are the best restaurants in Vancouver?” Not sure where the word graph comes into play, or whether this will catch on, but interesting to see a new Facebook tool in its infancy and whether it will become part of the mainstream.
Your thoughts? Is Graph Search the new Google? Will you use it? What are the potential downfalls of the concept?
