Where Facebook Falters: Underachievement in Social Search and Discovery

Facebook, much more so than MySpace, is based on a strong foundation of off-line networks of trust – college or high school classmates, old friends, co-workers, or business contacts. Via newsfeed and email notifications, Facebook does a fine job of keeping folks up-to-date on the current favorite songs, geographic location, complicated relationships, and Scrabulous activities of those in their trusted networks. As far as information exchange – bookmarking, link-sharing, most-read articles, etc – is concerned, however, the popular social networking site has yet to really leverage the social structure they have created to apply it to search and discovery.

Some users are indeed sharing links they find on the web via Facebook and you will also see a fair amount of Facebook bookmarklets (a la Digg, del.icio.us) next to news articles and popular videos, but the vast majority of link-sharing is occurring outside of Facebook where these networks of trusts users have taken the time to build on-site cannot be effectively utilized. Facebook should consider the development of updates or displays as simple as “this week’s top links in my network” or related Facebook groups based on my bookmarks, ranging to options that dig a little deeper like a search leveraging the collective knowledge of Linux experts and their connections. This would lead to greater user-awareness and utilization of these search and discovery capabilities through social networks.

Social search features such as the ability to search keywords or links within certain networks would also be an important connection for Facebook users to trusted content on the web. Facebook thus far has done a very poor job with search – only allowing searches performed across Facebook-determined networks with a practically non-existent search across posted links or content. And it wouldn’t necessarily be an easy fix - at this point there would be certain challenges to developing search technology compatible with Facebook’s underlying structure because, well…search is just plain hard. This is why most social search sites don't actually run the search themselves, why some “regular search engines" give up after trying, why "search companies sell for a premium", and why "you may not want to try to do search yourself."

Throw a Facebook app at it? Creating a third-party search application wouldn’t really solve the problem here. Apps don’t integrate with the framework of the site well enough to make it possible for a third-party to offer useful search capabilities. A large portion of one user’s trusted network would have to add the application in order for it to be remotely effective, which really just complicates what should be a fairly straightforward functionality – a network search. Applications are also treated as a separate entity from Facebook groups, pages, profiles, etc as indicated by current “search results” – again with a lack of integration. Network search capabilities would have to be engrained into the site itself with Facebook, Inc. at the helm in order to succeed here and really accomplish something noteworthy in the social search space.