Here’s the thing: on the merits, Facebook’s new Graph Search isn’t a bad idea. In fact, it’s sort of the holy grail of search: instead of relying on the tender mercies of SEO and Google’s algorithms and spam- and bot-riddled screen-scraping sites, why not ask all your friends whether the iPhone or the Nexus 4 is a better choice? Or where there’s decent Indian food in Arlington, Virginia? (Hint: keep looking.) What Facebook proposes to provide is a rich data-mining tool for getting at the hidden information patterns and valued knowledge buried in the avalanche of information created and curated by your Facebook friends.
Two big problems here, of a piece with one another.
The first is that it requires you to put all this information into Facebook and make it accessible. Even if that wasn’t a colossal pain in the ass – must click “Like” on some page for more or less everything in your life, fill in location check-ins, etc etc – Facebook is about the last company on Earth worth entrusting anything important to. And for this to function optimally, you have to have everyone putting in all their information and leaving it largely public or at the very least broadly available.
The second is that you’re not the only one who gets this tool. So does every stalker, spammer and advertiser on Facebook. There isn’t an obvious solution for how you put all this information together and share it with your friends without also sharing it with anyone else – especially if some of your friends are data-sluts and put EVERYTHING on Facebook in the clear. And Zuck already said today that they haven’t looked at how to monetize this yet.
But let’s be real, we know how this went down before: Facebook was once a walled garden, a place where you could use your real name – had to use your real name – and then, in the biggest Internet bait and switch ever, they pulled down the walls and went fully public with a huge stash of verified personal information. Now, they’re asking you to feed even more information into their gaping maw, with the promise that their privacy controls will be as effective as ever…while also acknowledging that they haven’t yet determined how to cash in on it. Remember, Facebook is a publicly traded company now, so job one is improving shareholder value. And the way to do that is to make money, and the way to do that is advertising – now more targeted and personal than ever.
We are slowly coming to a reckoning in the Internet economy. The prospect of value for money only seems to hold with some iOS applications – anything else, any web service, people expect to be free. Facebook, Twitter, SBNation, Evernote, Dropbox, Google, all of it: free. Well, if it’s free, how do they keep the lights on and the service running? And in most cases, that boils down to advertising, and that advertising is only valuable if they can tune it as finely as possible to appeal to the target market. In a way, we may almost have to start giving in, because the choice could well come down to either a) some finely-targeted high-value advertising OR b) huge great whopping torrents of generalized advertising, because they don’t know how to target it any more precisely and the only alternative is the blunderbuss.
There are plenty of services out there I’d pay for rather than consent to personal data-mining in the name of “free-at-point-of-use.” Twitter, quite frankly, and I sort of do that already with app.net…which hasn’t seen much growth because it costs to get on board. Everybody has decided that the model is “start free and then use advertising to make money,” and cash-on-the-barrelhead-up-front just doesn’t seem to get traction. Like it or not, we’re voting with our closed wallets, and since we’re not the buyer, we have to go about determining how we want to be the product.