Category Archives: Social Media

Facebook Graph Search is coming… now taking requests!

by Eric Posted on January 24, 2013

Just got access to Facebook’s new Graph Search feature.

There’s nothing “new” here, in that Facebook is not all of a sudden showing photos of you that you’ve hidden or never knew existed, it’s just making it easier for it to, well, be surfaced.

Graph Search is not done being built-out yet, so things that are dependent on relationships won’t yield as much result (sorry, people looking for single friends of their friends, nothing here for you yet). And everything is dependent on what you are willing to share with Facebook – so if your Facebook is completely empty, you’re finee.

Will Graph Search change the way we interact with Facebook? Probably. In the limited time I’ve been playing with it, new ideas start surfacing of how to use this, for both personal and professional purposes. That being said, again, this is all dependent on informations that users have shared. The way to conduct searches is a bit strict too, so the more Facebook can figure out how to bring in natural language processing into this, the better this experience will become.

What does all this mean for you?

  • You think those photos are long gone? Check again. Those photos you are tagged in just might not be so private. I tested out Graph Search with a bunch of friends and the response was overwhelmingly “HOW DID YOU GET THAT PHOTO”.
  • Those Likes buttons you’ve been clicking on just on a whim? They’re about to come back and bite you in the ass. Start unliking things if you don’t want to be linked to those search results.
  • There’s a lot Facebook can surface, yeesh. Start conducting vanity searches the moment you receive the Graph Search upgrade.

There’s all sorts of fun things you can do here – like:

  • Photos of Eric Ho from 2011 taken in New York, New York
  • Friends of Eric Ho who Likes Basketball
  • Friends of friends who work at Facebook
  • Males who like Gossip Girls (1. nothing wrong with that, and 2. FB refers to “females” – how very Jersey Shore of them)
  • Friends of Mark Zuckerberg who Likes Google (haha, no result for this yet)

I am now taking requests! Let me know what kind of searches you would like to see and I’ll update the post with some of these hilarious results that are popping up.

Posted in Social Media | Leave a comment

Late night musing: man, search sucks in social

by Eric Posted on April 27, 2012

Late night thoughts:

Man, why does search suck so bad in social?

Both Facebook and Twitter really does a horrible job at search – can never find what I need, here are some examples:
- Trying to find a person on twitter
- Trying to find your own old tweet (say, your first tweet?)
- Trying to find the right person to include in your tweet (auto complete sucks majorly here, try it)
- Trying to find find someone using their phone number on Facebook (got a missed call, do I know the person? let me check – oh wait I can’t)
- … and the list goes on and on

Oh, and here’s a complaint for GOOGLE, who should’ve mastered this by now. Google Contacts – why are there so many damn duplication in here? Should be able to say, parse a number entry and compare and match contacts with the same numbers, no? Or similar names? E.g. Tiff = Tiffany? For the search giant, sure hasn’t put any effort into creating a good contacts program.

Completely understand the amount of data and processing that goes into these things, but come on! Maybe you put a cap in time frame or something, but sigh….

There’s no way that the twitters of the world will open up their door to let Google power their search – these data is how they make money, so they need to figure out these kind of things fast… I’m looking at you, Facebook, all those information and could’ve capitalized a lot more on advertising and personalized customizations.

If someone cracks social search, please please let me know.

/end rant.

Posted in Social Media, Thoughts | Leave a comment