When will we see the Summize for Facebook?
Jul 15th, 2008 @ 23:17
What happens, when you spend almost an entire evening playing some stupid game? You miss important news, that's what happens :-)
Anyhoo, the rumors were true: Twitter has bought Summize (a real time search engine indexing Twitter) - you may have read this on TechCrunch.
Summize is now aptly named "Twitter Search" and located at search.twitter.com.
Good news. Those of you out there who are using Summize dread what Twitter would be like without it - and the rest of you (Twitter users) are about to discover a nifty tool :-)
The Summize approach to Twitter has got me thinking. When will we see a real time search engine indexing Facebook? It could index the mini feed of every Facebook user (Facebook users should be allow to hide or to select "only index my status updates") and be searchable right away.
Now why the heck would you want that?
The reason? As the Facebook platform evolves (you may have noticed that it's possible to comment on things in another person's mini feed like, say, their status updates), more and more people post more and more information into Facebook. As you may know it's virtually impossible to follow what your friends are posting on Facebook - unless you can spend an entire day doing nothing else.
When the comment feature gains momentum and a larger audience we'll no doubt see a great deal of conversations taking place in the "Face sphere". And wouldn't it be nice to be able to search all that information and subscribe to a certain phrase (like your name) by RSS (like with Summize) or with an internal Facebook subscribe tool, so you'll know when someone mentions you or a certain phrase, that you'd like to watch.
Maybe it should only be possible to search in your friends mini feeds, I don't know - I haven't thought this feature completely through, just realized that I would like it :-)
Relations between people are going to be huge this year and the next and Facebook is a major ingredient in this recipe.
Click the images for credits
Related postsTags: Facebook, Microblogging, News, summize, Twitter