It’s a big week for Facebook. Yesterday they announced the Friendfeed acquisition and today they’re upgrading their search capabilities.
When I teach personal branding on Facebook, I always warned people to make a note of important things when they see them – that the information will disappear into the stream as fast as it got there. Now that is no more. Facebook has improved search to cover all those great (and not-so-great) things in your stream.
According to their blog post,
You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan. If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people’s profiles as well as relevant Facebook Pages, groups and applications.
So now you can find that site someone shared with you and you were going to look at later. The search results filter things on the left-hand side, which is a familiar format for Facebook users. You can view results by friends, posts, applications, and more. You can even search the Web and Facebook will source the results from bing.
This definitely makes Facebook more useful for me – if only because I do put off acting on my friends’ suggestions and this makes things more searchable. Will I change my privacy settings to make my content available to everyone on Facebook? Probably not. I’ll stick to my friends in my walled garden and be perfectly content.
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Cheers!
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by Brian Solis
I was alerted to a new list via Steve Rubel on Twitter that tracks the top 30 FriendFeed users based on Google ranking. Lifestream Blog‘s Mark Krynsky assembled the list based on a post by Glenn Slaven (the author of the great FriendFeed Comments WordPress Plugin). Slavenhad discovered that two FriendFeed users (Deepak & Kevin,) appeared in Google’s search results.
Krynsky decided to take Glenn’s lead and take the formula to the next level by listing the top 30 FriendFeed users based on those results.
Top 30 FriendFeed Users Based on Google Ranking
- Robert Scoble
- Louis Gray
- Paul Bucheit
- Steve Rubel
- Chris Baskind
- Mr. News Junk
- MG Siegler
- Frederic
- Muhammad Saleem
- Scott Beale
- Fred Wilson
- Dobromir Hadzhiev
- Michael Arrington
- Grant Bierman
- Corvida
- Leo Laporte
- Morton Fox
- Chris Pirillo
- Dave Winer
- Johannes Kleske
- Ryne Nelson
- Brian Solis
- Chris Dibona
- Veronica Belmont
- Tuaw
- Elliot Ng
- Mark Krynsky
- Brian Daniel Eisenberg
- Thomas Ho
- Bob Lee
Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, or Facebook.
by Brian Solis
Facebook continues to compete for your online lifestream and it’s doing an impressive job of positioning itself as the hub for your online brand.
Today Facebook is rolling out the ability to comment on updates within individual MiniFeeds, providing FriendFeed-like functionality.
Basically, as you update Facebook or outside social media services (that you’ve included in your MiniFeed such as Flickr, Last.fm, blogs, etc.) each instance aggregates into one, channeled and palatable data stream. If you’re checking on the recent feeds from friends and contacts, you can see everything that they’ve updated within Facebook and across the social Web in one easy-to-read feed. Now, like in FriendFeed, you have the ability to comment on each relevant entry directly in the feed.
As I predicted last year, aggregated services and the ability to comment within the feed represents the future of lifestreaming and activity streaming. It is also demonstrating the portability and distribution of conversations as people are flocking to aggregated streams to discuss thoughts, ideas, and the information shared within them without having to run to each point of origin to comment and followup. Everything is neatly packaged in one place and it’s only going to continue to fragment the conversation and force content creators to scour the Web in order to participate in the discussion they started.
Tools such as MiniFeed and FriendFeed only help focus the dialog and our attention.
Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, or Facebook.