Facebook just announced that they are now allowing public searches of their users by people without Facebook accounts.
Not much information is included in the results (see image below)- just the name and primary photograph included in the user profile, and users can easily elect to stop search engines from indexing their information by changing their privacy settings.
As Om Malik notes, this is yet another competitive threat in the burgeoning people search scene. We’ve recently covered five new people search engines - Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou. All of these services count on the fact that people information is distributed across many different websites and services.
To the extent any one service such as Facebook (or LinkedIn, etc.) gather lots of centralized information about a large group of people and then make it available for general search, these people search engines become much less important. If these startups were public entities, their market valuations would dip today.
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
FEC Determines That Blogs Count As Media
Saturday, September 8, 2007
People Search Business Just Got More Complicated As Facebook Enters Market
Monday, August 20, 2007
USAToday Says Traffic Way Up
Less than twelve hours after I posted that USAToday’s traffic appears to be going the wrong way, they issue a press release
USATODAY.com, recorded a 20% year-over year increase in traffic for the month of July 2007 and a month-over-month growth of 24% according to Nielsen/NetRatings. It was also reported that more than 10.6 million unique visitors came to USATODAY.com in the month of July.
Much of the increase was attributed to the Simpson’s Movie (the site held a contest around it) and an exclusive interview with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.
This was issued way too fast to have been a response to my post, so the timing is coincidental. I also received an email from Pluck CEO Dave Panos, who says that their social networking tools are doing very well on USAToday’s site. He says “The results that USA Today has received from our social media tools has been absolutely phenomenal and usage continues to skyrocket each and every month. I wish I was a liberty to give you the specific metrics — but they are staggering.”
Well, if the results are indeed “staggering,” (in a good way) the Comscore data must be pointing the wrong way. That’s good news for USAToday, and even better news for Pluck.
But the situation isn’t certain. The Comscore data I posted only went through June. The data released today is for July. A 24% traffic increase from June to July is too much of a jump, too. As they said in the press release, the Simpson’s contest and the Rowling interview probably helped drive most or all of the gains.
What would be ideal is if USAToday or Pluck published a case study on the results of the social network experiment to date.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Hollywood mourns a marvel
By William Keck, USA TODAY Merv Griffin's greatest successes may always be considered the game shows he created, Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune.
Spokeswoman: 'Jeopardy' inventor Merv Griffin dies at 82
Entertainer and Entrepreneur Merv Griffin Dies at 82
http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn
