Facebook Framework for Finding
September 28, 2010
I am trying to locate the Louisville East End Social Security Office. I navigated to Google and entered “SSA Local”. No joy. I snagged my phone and fired off an SMS to a friend. The friend sent me a text message with the directions.
A small thing, sure. But what about the notion of timely, precise information?
I read “Facebook CEO Hints at Social Mobile Application Framework” and had a small insight. Facebook is going to make life difficult for some search and retrieval vendors. Microsoft owns a piece of Facebook, so maybe the pain won’t be much more than a mosquito bite on a 20 year old hiking the Appalachian Trail in July. Yahoo has ties to Microsoft. So that may leave Google as a potential Nash or Oldsmobile.
To me, an important comment in the article was:
Facebook wants to offer a new social mobile application framework based on open standards, kind of like a counterpart to the tons of mobile application frameworks already found on smartphones. Ultimately this framework will tap directly into smartphone functionality through APIs, like every other framework, only that Facebook’s framework will be “social and friends” oriented.
A social framework is an interesting notion. Data fusion companies could plug into Facebook and develop applications for marketing firms and others with an interest in real time content streams.
Latency is emerging as the next big problem for many content processing companies. Delays in information access translate into less accurate predictive outputs. More data faster is the mantra. But the major impact of a Facebook framework if it comes to pass may be on search.
Why rely on high latency, brute force indexing methods when you can ask a social content pool and then obtain results from a curated list of “friends”. There’s geolocation and more traditional search methods to smooth out the potholes the friendless may encounter.
Social search just worked for me. On to the Social Security Office to contemplate the future of search.
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2010
Freebie
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