September 5, 2007 10:38 AM
Facebook Enables Profile Search to Non-Members, Search Engine to Follow Soon
Facebook, the web’s second most popular social networking site today announced that it is enabling non-Facebook registered members to search for their friends’ profiles in the Facebook network. Subsequently in the coming weeks, Facebook would also allow search engine to crawl member profile pages, enabling other people to search for Facebook profiles through search engine portals.
This feature has catapulted LinkedIn, a rival social networking site from a small time, run of the mill social networking site to its current status of being the web’s social networking site with a business/corporate attitude. This feature also caused a significant increase in LinkedIn’s membership base.
Thus, it is no wonder that Facebook is doing the same thing to its members’ profile database. Opening its membership profiles to the public, including search engine crawlers could generate renewed interest to the social networking site, and lose interest to existing members.
Although, Facebook is still giving its members an option to not to disclose their profile into the public listing, still some members may fail to set this option and thereby exposed themselves to spammers and email annoyances.
This new feature announcement came in just when Facebook has been all over the web with news of new third party applications being developed specifically for integration into the Facebook interface. This third party application has been generating quite an interest among Facebook members and non-members alike.
It is therefore unexpected of Facebook to introduce such new feature which seem to have to possible effects among its membership. Either the public search listing will be successful or not, remains to be seen. Although analyst lean more on the negative rather than the positive effect of this recent Facebook announcement.
Leave a comment