{"id":14252,"date":"2013-01-30T13:38:30","date_gmt":"2013-01-30T17:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=14252"},"modified":"2013-01-30T13:40:26","modified_gmt":"2013-01-30T17:40:26","slug":"first-impressions-of-graph-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/01\/30\/first-impressions-of-graph-search\/","title":{"rendered":"First Impressions of Graph Search"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Facebook just enabled its new Graph Search for my profile and I wanted to share some initial reactions (beyond the 140 character variety<\/a>). Facebook\u2019s new search function allows users to mine their Facebook accounts for things like: \u201cFriends that like eggs\u201d or \u201cPhotos of me and my friends who live near Chuck E. Cheese\u2019s. \u201d The suggested search function is pretty prominent, which serves the double role of telling you what is searchable and how to phrase your search.\u00a0 More than anything else, Graph Search is a stark reminder of how much information you and your friends have given to Facebook. More importantly however, it marks a significant change in how Facebook users see each other and themselves in relation to their data.. You no longer see information through people; you start to see people as affiliated with certain topics or artifacts. Graph Search is like looking at your augmented life from some floating point above the Earth.<\/p>\n

Graph Search makes Facebook feel \u201cbigger\u201d and more intimate at the same time. I say bigger because you are no longer an individual who likes The Talking Heads or has too many photos of food. Instead, Graph Search makes me feel as though my friends and I are single instances of Instagramed food within an enormous database of lonely eaters. You just see more of the social landscape and connections come into high relief. Seeing those connections (some of which I saw for the first time) provide an instant \u201cin group\u201d feel. If you didn\u2019t come up in my search for \u201cfriends who like cats\u201d you are, by default, a dog person. You are different and you don\u2019t understand my cat tree.<\/a><\/p>\n

Not only does your perspective change, but the order with which I think about my friends and our mutual interests change as well. Facebook has outgrown its namesake, and now resembles something closer to a social search engine. (Something Zuckerberg has wanted for a long time<\/a>.) This shift, from a book of faces to an indexed catalogue of varying living and non-living objects, means Facebook can update me on things as well as people. Whereas before Graph Search you could search for people and groups of people (including bands and companies), now you can search for just about anything and see how it relates to your friends. It\u2019s a total deconstruction of my augmented life. Obscure trends are suddenly completely obvious. For example, when I searched \u201cMusic my friends like\u201d the top hit (60 friend likes) was \u201cIngtzi\u201d my friend\u2019s DJ-ing name<\/a>. A Facebook PR person would call your attention to the fact that Ingtzi isn\u2019t the most popular musician among my friends, but the most unique result among my particular friend distribution. (I have no doubt \u201cThe Beatles\u201d or something equally generic outnumbers Ingtzi.)<\/p>\n