While many hoped that Facebook would launch today its long-awaited smartphone, Mark Zuckerberg took a different direction at the press conference held at Facebook’s HQ in California. He introduced Graph Search, a method of browsing friends and making new connections depending on certain criteria.
Facebook’s new feature, while not exactly mind-blowing, is something that the social network has been obviously missing. Trying to sort friends according to their taste or simply checking if someone liked a certain TV show was not only a nearly impossible task, but also a very time-consuming one. Fortunately, Graph Search will help you sort things out now.
Mind you, this internal search engine developed by Facebook won’t help you find only friends who like Cycling, like in the above photo. Basically, what Graph Search does is to create connections between bits and pieces of information found in each and every Facebook page, no matter if it’s of an individual or of a company.
Sure, it’s easy to find people from a certain area that share specific interests with you (matchmaking, anyone?), but it is also able to pull out photos of your friends from a specific city. As far as matchmaking goes, Zuckenberg states that Graph Search comes with a well-defined privacy policy. That should keep stalkers away!
Graph Search is currently in Beta, and the ones wanting to join the waiting list should go to this page and click on the button found at the bottom. As I mentioned before, I don’t think that Graph Search is an impressive feature of Facebook, but simply something that the social network should have implemented a long time ago, if not at its very beginning. Besides the obvious sorting function, Graph Search should also help people to find like-minded people, which is very important for keeping one’s sanity intact.
The guys at Gizmodo gave Graph Search a try and so far, the results are impressive, in their opinion. The only complaint is that Facebook’s search engine is nowhere as responsive as Google. Well, that’s highly, Spock would say! Google has been doing this for over 15 years and it actually started as a search engine that later expanded into a thousand different directions, while Facebook has just realized that it lacked a search function. Anyway, it’d be much easier from now on to spot geeks on this social network!
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