New and Improved Facebook Search Now Open

It has been sometime since I blogged, and this was as good a topic as any…..

I started using the new Facebook search experience yesterday and wanted to share some of my thoughts on why I think this is a great upgrade. (see the Facebook blog announcement here for the roll out earlier today)

Figure 1: Example Facebook search for “boulder” across the “Posts by Everyone” setting
Here is a simple example of being able to search to find out what other people are talking about around me in Boulder. This was just not possible prior to the search update. The closest you could get is trying to join various groups and networks and then individually check out each page. Now, with the search friends and search everyone there is a way to span and quickly find who is talking about the topic you care about.

Figure 2: Example Facebook search on “football” in the “Posts by Friends” setting
Here is an example where I searched to find out who in my friendnetwork is excited about the upcoming football season.

The new search experience is rolling out to all users according to the Facebook announcement and on first using it looks great. As someone who using the newer “everyone” setting for my status updates this really adds more incentive for sharing and broadcasting what I am doing to the Facebook ecosystem.

Industry write ups on the announcement

• TechCrunch: Facebook Flips the Switch on Real-time Search
• ReadWriteWeb: Facebook Updates Are Now Searchable; Not What Most Users Joined For

So now Twitter wants to be like everyone else?

A lot has been written about the new @replies change on Twitter that happened earlier this week

• TechCrunch: Twitter’s Spectacularly Awful 24 Hours
• TechCrunch: Twitter Decides We’re Not Smart Enough For @Replies, Changes Them Again
• Mashable:  Twitter, Welcome to the Trough of Disillusionment! [Video]
• ReadWriteWeb: Twitter Reverses Policy Change, For Now. This is Nuts But Here’s How It Works (UPDATED: Only A Little Reversed)
• The #fixreplies conversation on Twitter:  http://search.twitter.com/search?q=fixreplies
• Added since original posting:  Geek and Poke http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2009/05/forget-the-crisis.html

It is really interesting to watch how companies deal with customer outcry.   There is the famous “Coke” vs “New Coke” episode from the 80′s (read here if you missed it) which was one where the company ended up bringing the original product back due to customer demand.    I am curious why the feature was changed at Twitter.  Was it a business decision or a technology decision?  Was there any qualitative or quantitative data used in making the decision?

I do know that the change to @replies impacts me as I had opted to see all the noise since it was a nice way to be introduced to people and topics from my network.    What Twitter decides to do is anyone’s guess, but from a customer service standpoint I think they should find a way that allows users to opt-in to using @replies in the “old way”

(Added after initial post:  Some discussions are including the claim that only 3% of users are being impacted by the @replies change.  I’m in that group if that is an accurate number.   My guess is that a lot of power users are impacted)

http://postrank.com/graphics/b.gif?s=x5wxs6i

Are Social Networks Going Mainstream?

I have seen a few interesting reports and had some experiences that lead me to believe that usage of social networks is becoming more mainstream.

First, in the last couple of months it seems like a surge of past friends have found me on Facebook.  In addition, my wife felt compelled to join Facebook a month ago because she was finding a lot of friends were using the site.  Also, one she was speaking with a friend of ours that now lives in another part of the country about something and her friend responded – “yes, I knew that because I saw it on Shane’s Facebook status”.     One last thing was that my parents also set up a Facebook account because they were finding some of our relatives and friends were now using it to keep in touch, post photos, etc.

Then I came across a Pew Internet report on “Adults and Social Networks” which is a good read.   The statistics that stood out the most to me were the percentage of adults with a profile on a social network.  According to the report:

• “The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now”
• “75% of adults 18-24 use social networks”
• “57% of adults 24-34 use social networks”
• “When users do use social networks for professional and personal reasons, they will often maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites”

From my own experiences and observations I would have expected that usage of social networks is increasing but would not have yet been in a position to say they are “mainstream”.  However, when I am confronted with a combination of strong correlating and independent observations and some good third-party data it forces me to at least believe that some form of social network is here to stay for the long-term.

Update: Thanks to @skemsley a nice Geek & Poke comic that fits well with the theme of this post

Social Internet Growth and Adoption

I like to take generic polls or ask random people about new technologies to gauge where adoption is in the real-world since those of us that work in the industry can create real big niches and echo chambers.

A few recent observations include the following

• Last week I had the chance to speak to the first year MBA students at the Purdue Krannert School of Management. I had the opportunity to speak about careers in marketing and focused on my experiences in business to business marketing and product management. I also asked questions to the students in order to better focus the discussion and my examples. The total sample size was about a couple hundred people and it was interesting to note the social internet tools being used by this educated and connected group.
  • About 50% are Facebook users
  • About 20% are using Flickr or other photo service
  • About 10% are using LinkedIn, Plaxo or similar service for networking
  • No one admitted to using Twitter or a similar stand-alone micro-blogging service
• A few weeks ago I spent a couple days at the Defrag Conference where just from watching the audience one would guess 99% are using Twitter or a similar stand-alone micro-blogging service. In fact a big hit at the conference was the group Twitter stream (http://www.twitter.com/defrag08) that was set up by EventVue, the community software provider used by the conference, using the Gnip Platform. At times there were dozens of people live commenting on the sessions they were attending and the conversations among participants rivaled the actual presenter.
• While I was home for Thanksgiving I ended up trying to explain to my Mom what it is that Gnip does. Given I started a few months ago this is the first time I had seen in person and we eventually had the “so what does the new company do that you work at”. I really like these conversations with my Mom as it reminds me that the rest of the world knows very little about the software and technology industries — other then somehow Microsoft is bad and Apple is good, but why is not clear. Anyway, she got the idea that Gnip makes it easy to integrate data from sources across the Internet and several of my examples. Twitter really through her for a loop — she said “why would I want to post random thoughts and why would anyone want to read those?” and my favorite “how do you learn to get a meaningful thought in 140 characters?.

What does all this mean. I read a lot of reports from all kind of analysts on the adoption growth rates for social media as I am sure some of the people who bother reading my blog do as well. To me it seems that we probably have farther to go for more general adoption of the new social internet tools then we like to admit in the industry, which I usually attribute to the Echo Chamber issue. That said I remain very confident that many of the capabilities and tools that are available today will reach mainstream adoption like earlier communication and collaboration tools have over the years — think email, sms and instant messaging. These all several years or even a good decade or two in order to become mature and reach the mainstream. Being just a couple years into the evolution of the social internet we are very much only on the front to middle edge of early adopters.

Been busy, some light youtube video to watch

I have been busy and not blogged much here lately as I have been blogging on the work side of the world a lot (http://blog.gnipcentral.com).

Anyway, here are some light weekend videos

1) Where is hell is Matt? I always smile when I watch this…and Matt has a great personal story you can read here

2) I really enjoyed this video and whether you supported our new president-elect or not this was a great speech he gave several months ago that wil.i.am turned into an amazing video