Facebook’s Graph Search: Big Deal or Big Flop?

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Show Me Your Friends and I’ll Show You Your Future

It’s a well known truism.  Think about your friends.  Where are they? What are they doing? Are they successful in life? In their jobs? In their marriages?  They have influence on our lives, our decisions and our behavior.  Do you look to them for recommendations and opinions?  Most of us do, and Mark Zuckerberg is counting on making money from those relationships.

An article on Forbe’s website yesterday (Why Facebook’s Graph Search is a Very Big Deal by Elise Ackerman) touted Facebook’s announcement of “Graph Search” as “a very big deal”.  Ackerman wrote that it was just the right solution for finding the right cheese steak sandwich when visiting Philadelphia or the right hotel in Paris–both based on what your friends “like”.  Facebook is a “Recommendation Engine”

Hmmm . . . Given that the average Facebook user has only 190 friends, this seems like a huge effort that will produce very little useable information for most people.  Zuckerberg says that Graph Search will extend beyond your friends to friends of your friends, but even that further reach may not produce much in terms of great data.

So, what’s going to happen?  Of course this is all brand new and is not even accessible to most users just yet, but my prediction is a whole new level of “Like” spam and friend requests to influencers.  Think about it.  If you are a Paris hotel, how do you get your property to appear in a Facebook Graph Search?  You have to have lots of “Likes” and more importantly those Likes need to come from the people with a great network of friends.  “Like Us on Facebook” will take on a whole new importance.  Get ready for “Like” bribery.  And, if you’re perceived as an influencer, get ready to be barraged with bribes!

But here’s the problem . . . When was the last time you jumped on to Facebook to find a hotel, a restaurant, a used car, a plumber, an electrician, an accountant, a movie review, etc., etc.?  Never?  That’s what I thought.  And that’s what I see as the big problem.  People are already spending huge chunks of time on Facebook, but they are used to switching over to Google to find a plumber when they need one.  Can Facebook break this habit?  Time will tell.

But, while you’re waiting, log on to Facebook and like us!  Like Us On Facebook!

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