In what might be its most controversial move yet, Facebook has announced that user profiles will be available for public search, ie you dont have to register or login to be able to search the Facebook database; you can just do a google search.
Now, is this going to catapult Facebook ahead of rivals by making it truly open and accessible; or will it scare away the privacy conscious??
Steve O'Hear at ZDnet has an interesting take on this:
"Within this context, does Facebook’s “public search listing” make the situation worse? I’m going to say no. Let me explain why.
Facebook results will inevitably end up pretty high in Google’s index, so a search for my name through Google — were I to opt in — would probably bring up my Facebook profile before many of my other social web presences, let alone what others have written about me. Presuming this works out to be the case, the end result is that I now have more control over what “digital litter” you see first, because I can edit my profile any time I like, and the search engine will re-index the results. In other words, I now at least have a chance to influence how I’m represented on Google and online in general."
And while we're still on social networking, check out ( via ZDnet )
If this does turn out to be true, then it could be the start of something big. I can imagine several applications based on google + facebook. But, privacy concerns are not to be treated lightly. There is a very real possibility that public search could be misused in really twisted ways.
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