Today, Facebook is finally getting aboard the hashtag bandwagon with the first phase of a planned global rollout.

Hashtags will help organize timely conversations around popular topics, such as current events and public personalities.

Starting today, you can search for hashtags from the Graph Search bar. Also, hashtags created on services like Twitter and Instagram are now clickable on Facebook.

A technology hailing back to the early days of IRC, a hashtag is a type of metadata meant to indicate a category or categories for the content being posted. On Facebook, hashtags can now connect people and posts with categories in common.

In a blog post on the news, Facebooker Greg Lindley writes that television shows and sporting events generate huge buzz on Facebook. And while the buzz receives heavy monitoring from media and analytics folks, there’s not much connecting the data for consumers.

“To date, there has not been a simple way to see the larger view of what’s happening or what people are talking about,” said Lindley, who continued to note that hashtags are just the first step in making timely topics and related conversations easier to find on the network.

“We’ll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months, including trending hashtags and deeper insights, that help people discover more of the world’s conversations,” he concluded.

Once upon a time, we identified people, places, and things on Facebook using just strings of characters — letters in sequences that were never really sorted or categorized in any way.

Then along came Graph Search, Facebook’s fascinating way of organizing every string (of characters) on the network into a node (object) or an edge (characteristic/attribute). I am a node; my friendship with fellow writer Drew Olanoff is an edge. Drew’s “like” of Starbucks is an edge; Starbucks is a node. You get the idea.

So, how did Facebook turn those strings into nodes? Especially the non-person, non-brand-page nodes: How did the letters “c-h-o-k-e” that you typed into your profile in 2009 become Choke, the fictional 2001 novel by Chuck Palahniuk (another node), which has likes from 43 of your friends (also nodes!) and a complete synopsis on its own Facebook page? When did the letters become entities and, as part of Graph Search, fully searchable?

That’s the topic of a Facebook Engineering blog post today, a long read that’s well worth the effort for data nerds and programmers — and any Facebook user who’s just interested in how the whole thing works under the hood.

In a mini-treatise on what the company calls “entities,” the team writes that when you type “people who work at” into the Graph Search bar, you can see entities at work in the suggested list of employers that appears.

From the post:

People don’t just have connections to other people. They may use Facebook to check in to restaurants and other points of interest; they might show their favorite books and movies on their timeline; and they may also list their high school, college, and workplace. These 100+ billion connections form the entity graph … There are even connections between entities: a book has an author, a song has an artist, and movies have actors. All of these are represented by different kinds of edges in the graph.

Entities get a dedicated team of engineers at Facebook. To start building the entity graph, Facebookers used the form fields that have been around on Facebook since 2006 or so — you know, the little box where you’d type in the movies or music that you liked or what your religion is. Those strings, based on the boxes they showed up in, the power of statistics/probability, and related Wikipedia data, got turned into entities — actual structured data, something the company has been publicly focused on since the launch of Timeline in 2011 and the rollout of Facebook Actions in early 2012.

And that kind of string-to-object conversion was awesome, until they got to the profile of the idiot who wrote in the “Movies” field: “I only like movies with boobs lol.” Or the person who wrote in the “Books” section, “The Twilight books” instead of “The Twilight Saga” or “Breaking Dawn.” Or movies like “Miracle on 34th Street,” which has been through multiple remakes using the same title.

For unmatchable strings, Facebook created millions of Pages as “fallbacks” to store the possibly junk data. The site also started recommending entities to people who had typed in closely related strings.

As Graph Search continues to expand to include more people, places, and things — especially Open Graph-type things — behind-the-scenes work on entities will continue to get better, faster, and more accurate. If you see a Facebook entities engineer, please give him or her a hug.

Image credit: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat; Facebook

Facebook’s Graph Search is the company’s big bid to compete against the likes of Google, Yelp, and LinkedIn with people-powered, connections-based search. And interestingly enough, even though its machines run on a deep understanding of nodes and edges that bind all of humanity and our habitats into an enormous web, its front end has to handle very human language.

Google has for the past decade or two been training us to search with keywords rather than natural phrases. For example, a Google web search might read “bookstore Alamogordo wifi coffee” rather than “What bookstores in Alamogordo have free Wi-Fi and serve coffee?”

But Facebook, as engineers Xiao Li and Maxime Boucher note today on the company blog, takes a different approach. [See full post embedded below.]

The Graph Search team iterated over possible query interfaces at the early stage of this project. There was consensus among the team that a keyword-based system would not be the best choice because ofthe fact that keywords, which usually consist of nouns or proper nouns, can be nebulous in their intent. For example, “friends Facebook” can mean “friends on Facebook,” “friends who work at Facebook Inc.,” or “friends who like Facebook the Page.” Keywords, in general, are good for matching objects in the graph but not for matching connections between the objects. A query built on keywords would fail in cases where a user needs to precisely express intent in terms of both nodes and edges in the graph.The team also toyed with the idea of form-filling augmented by drop-down filters. However, because of all the possible options you could search for in Facebook’s data, this would easily lead to an interface of hundreds of filters. In mid-2011, the team converged around the idea of building a natural language interface for Graph Search, which we believe to be the most natural and efficient way of querying the data in Facebook’s graph.

The post goes into further detail about parse trees, which basically conjugate a natural language query, separating it into usable data and a stack for when and where to search for which terms; the flexibility of natural language search via lexical analysis; entity detection; and semantic parsing.

It’s a hefty but satisfying read for those interested in the future and present realities of the technology behind all kinds of evolving search.

Facebook natural language engineering

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Facebook loves local business, apparently. And local business love Facebook.

Facebook cracked the lid on some of the data from its massive social graph today, and the results are astonishing. There are two billion connections — essentially, likes — between consumers and local businesses, and in an average week, local business pages on Facebook get more than 645 million views and 13 million comments.

In addition, a strong majority of Facebook users, more than 70 percent, are connected to at least one local business in their community.

That’s impressive.

It’s also worrying, if you’re a business involved in local search — for example, like Yelp, the traditional directories, the various Yellow Pages/White Pages websites, or OpenTable.

However, Facebook is likely first going after other, slightly less established targets, such as smarter services like Google Local and Apple’s Siri.

The strength of the social graph that Facebook is building — correction: that we are building on Facebook’s platform — is massive, and it is just starting to be unleashed on local business and the connections between people, places, and commerce.

Which, Facebook says, is exactly what small communities like Dixon, Illinois, are using to build community, strengthen local business, and connect people to small shops they care about. Businesses in Dixon have come together to create a monthly event, called Second Saturday, for shopping, arts, and community. The town is using Facebook to spread the word and build buzz.

Facebook’s graph is also increasingly being tied to additional data sources to help businesses both small and large find, target, and sell to consumers. Facebook recently announced Partner Categories, which will help advertisers target people in the market for specific classes of products based on both their offline and online behavior, and it is testing retargeted ads in the middle of the new news feed.

photo credit: asmythie via photopin cc

Facebook’s Graph Search is still in its infancy, but the company is ready to talk about how it actually works.

Graph Search is based on the idea that we — Facebook users — are all connected to each other and to various places, things, ideas, and events in unique and specific ways. So when I search for “restaurants,” I’m not really looking for the web page with the best correlation to the string of letters “r-e-s-t-a-u-r-a-n-t-s.” I’m looking for something most computers (and most databases) would have a hard time finding: A restaurant near me that I’m likely to enjoy.

The company seeks to overturn the search-by-keyword paradigm by offering something better, a sort of object-oriented approach to search. And this emphasis on attributes and nodes and the connections or edges between them is something Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “a trip back to our roots.”

We got a technical overview of Graph Search at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters last month. Today, the company has posted a more in-depth technical explanation of Graph Search on its Engineering Notes page.

“Our goal is to maximize searcher happiness,” writes search infrastructure engineering manager Sriram Sankar today on the company blog.

“Now that we have launched Graph Search, we are learning from the usage to understand which queries are popular and how they need to be optimized. We are also extending our search capabilities to do better text processing and ranking and have better mobile and internationalization support. Finally, we are also working on building a completely new vertical to handle searching posts and comments.”

All this magic is built on Unicorn, a fancy system for building indices of data — some of them too large to fit on a single machine — and then getting the data back quickly when someone does a search. This involves sharding the indices and creating an “in-memory database” with its own query language.

Each type of Facebook node — people, events, photos, etc. — gets its own “vertical” in Unicorn, because each of them has very different attribute types. Then, there’s a top aggregator that organizes the queries across multiple verticals (for example, when you search for “my friends in Arizona” and need to access verticals of people and places at the same time).

Our more technically oriented readers should definitely go check out the whole post. And you know what? The non-tech folks should read it, too. It will give you a wonderful under-the-hood look at a web feature you might end up using every day — something you’re not too likely to get from Google Web Search or Bing.

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook’s News Feed has finally gotten a long-awaited, well-deserved facelift. It’s a design overhaul that fits right in with the company’s shift to a highly visual aesthetic over the past two years.

You will start seeing the new News Feed on the web today; phone and tablet updates should happen over the next couple weeks.

Source: Official Facebook photo

This screenshot from Facebook shows off the old news feed style (left) and the new (right).

As founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg just announced at his company’s headquarters this morning, he wants Facebook’s News Feed to be each user’s “best personalized newspaper you can have” with social and local updates on a variety of topics.

“We also believe [it] should be visual, rich, and engaging,” he continued.

“Because News Feed supports such a broad range of content types, the format has to change as well. … News Feed has become primarily about visual content,” the CEO said, noting that currently, photos make up around 30 percent of all News Feed content.

Not surprisingly, photos are larger and more in-your-face in the new design.

Design is king in News Feed update

The update is not unlike the upgrade to Timelines that launched back in 2011. At that time, the engineering-centric company put a fresh focus on photos, videos, and engaging, interactive content as opposed to text updates.

Zuckerberg continued to say that today’s updates bring to News Feed a triple focus: rich, visual stories; your choice of feeds; and a mobile-inspired U.I.

Facebook design director Julie Zhuo showed off some features of the new design, especially as it pertains to brands. Logos and thumbnails are larger, and pictures and videos take up more of the page. Overall, the interface feels much more like a glossy web magazine than the old, text-heavy Facebook you’ve been used to.

Here’s an image gallery of the new News Feed.

New options for different slices of the News Feed

Chris Struhar, the technical lead for the new News Feed, also gave some updates on new options for it. Facebook is listening to user feedback about its algorithms and the stories those algorithms deliver, he said. People complain that they see too few relevant stories from close friends, so now, they can jump between various types of feeds to focus on different kinds of content.

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Facebook employees, including founder Mark Zuckerberg, discuss getting rid of the News Feed clutter.

An “all friends” feed to give you a full firehose of updates. It also has a “following” feed to show only branded content from news organizations and companies you’re following — a much-requested feature from people. The “music” feed shows music-related sharing and activity, plus photos or updates from musicians’ Pages. And the “photos” feed shows off the visual side of your network.

“We’ve tried photo feeds in the past, but never anything as vibrant as what you see today,” said Struhar.

Mobile continues to play a big role in Facebook’s updates

Also, as Facebook exec Chris Cox pointed out, the design is mobile-inspired. While Facebook got its start a bit too soon to be mobile-first, it’s quickly playing catch up on mobile competencies and mobile interfaces.

Cox said today’s updates will bring more consistency between Facebook on the web and Facebook on mobile, fulfilling the network’s previously expressed goals about delivering Facebook everywhere without regard to platform.

“It’s amazing how much more modern and clean this feels just because we’ve adapted some of the things we’ve done for the tablet and for mobile and brought them to the web,” Cox said.

Hope for revenue fits into Facebook’s ‘three pillar’ model

When Facebook’s Graph Search launched just two months ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said these three products — Timeline, News Feed, and Graph Search — constitute Facebook’s “three pillars” as a company and a web service. And in each of the three, he said the company is striving to focus on its roots, which lie in personal connections and information’s relevance to those connections.

And we Facebook users can’t forget that all this revenue hangs not on Timelines or Graph Search but on News Feed, which remains for now the sole money-maker among those three pillars.

For advertisers, Facebook reps said that ads will, like your updates, be “richer and more immersive.”

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Mobile is always top of mind for Facebook.

Zuckerberg also said, about creating more ad inventory across the different feeds, “There’s more [user] demand for more content, and we don’t necessarily want to push more stuff to the front page.”

In the company’s most recent earnings call, we learned that advertising made up 84 percent of Facebook’s total revenue: $1.33 billion in the last quarter alone, which makes up 13.3 percent of the total online ad market.

Also, mobile revenue made up nearly one quarter of all ad revenue in Q4, for a (relatively) huge $306 million.

In fact, Facebook’s mobile ads — which didn’t even exist mere months ago — have led to a huge boom in the U.S. mobile advertising market.

“With 25 percent of revenue going to mobile in the fourth quarter, Facebook has cemented its position as the leader in mobile display advertising in the U.S. by a wide margin,” an eMarketer analyst told VentureBeat recently via email.

Additional reporting by Meghan Kelly. Zuckerberg image via Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Today, throngs of reporters have gathered at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters to hear about the social network’s latest updates to News Feed.

News Feed is the single most public-facing Facebook feature. As such, it’s also the most-often complained-about feature.

Leading up to today’s big launch, consumers and news outlets alike have been buzzing about what the changes might bring and what normal Facebook users are hoping to get out of the day’s announcements.

But what most are hoping for is a massive change that would toy with Facebook’s long-cultivated revenue streams and tinker with one of its most precious pieces of IP: The News Feed algorithm.

How News Feed works now

Currently, News Feed is the service’s default landing page for logged-in users, displaying updates, images, and events from all your Facebook-connected friends as well as any brands, companies, or organizations whose Pages you “like” on the site.

From its inception, the Facebook social graph has faced a problem of information overload. Imagine you have just 100 friends on Facebook, and each one updates their profile just twice a day. That’s 200 updates of varying lengths, each with a unique claim on your time and ability to respond, and each with a different degree of relevance to your actual interests and daily life.

The solution is almost entirely programmatic. News Feed’s carefully crafted and constantly updated algorithms (bits of logic like if/then statements that attempt to intelligently sort information and arrive at optimal outcomes) attempt to sort every update in your network not just by its overall relevance or importance but also by its direct relevance to you.

Imagine, for example, that you like Kim Kardashian’s Facebook Page. On Tuesday, she posts a selfie with Kanye West that gets thousands of likes in the first five minutes it’s online. Meanwhile, your mom also posts an update that she got a new dog following the passing of the much-loved family retriever; it’s a Yorkie, and your Dad is not happy, and all your siblings and even your cousins are weighing in.

Facebook would know that your dear, sweet Ma’s update is actually more important and relevant to you than Ms. Kardashian’s, and it would put that update at the top of your News Feed.

The problem with News Feed

What most users we polled are hoping for today is a total revamp of how that algorithm works, or at least how well it works.

“Not seeing the posts of the people and pages I’m following,” said VentureBeat reader Dona Collins, is her biggest problem with News Feed. “The algorithm still seems a bit too random.”

That statement was highly “liked” on the VentureBeat’s own Facebook page and was echoed by many others who said they didn’t see enough posts from their actual friends, that they didn’t see the kinds of posts they wanted to see.

Others complained about the prevalence and placement of advertising in News Feed, especially when it comes to Sponsored Stories. These updates initially appear to be similar to other kinds of content from friends in your News Feed; however, they’re actually paid for by companies and promoted to a huge audience regardless of their relevance to individuals. It’s basically commercial algorithmic override.

Sponsored Stories started popping up in their latest, most subtle form in June last year. And interestingly, they’re also a huge part of Facebook’s plan to monetize its mobile products.

“As companies are promoting services more frequently on mobile, this option gives them the opportunity to focus on specific placements that will impact them most directly,” a Facebook rep told VentureBeat in a recent email exchange.

Most users we talked to said they’d simply like to see more relevance in advertising and more separation between the information they see from people and brands.

A three-headed beast

News Feed, along with Graph Search and Timeline, is one of three main products Facebook is focusing on as core to its site and service.

In fact, when Graph Search launched just two months ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said these three products constitute Facebook’s pillars as a company and a web service. And in each of the three, he said the company is striving to focus on its roots, which lie in personal connections and information’s relevance to those connections.

Timeline, the oldest of the three products, came out late in 2011. It represented a complete overhaul in how Facebook designed and displayed personal profiles and information. It was more visually appealing, more personally expressive, and more modern than any product the engineering-centric company had rolled out in the past.

“We looked at a lot of print, and we did entire studies on scrapbooks,” Facebook product chief Sam Lessin told VentureBeat in an interview in San Francisco during Timeline’s initial roll-out period.

“We’d get out a big box of old pictures, flip through the photos and talk about them. We were watching test users reminisce over these things, and we tried to design with that in mind and create that experience.”

Graph Search, on the other hand, is a much more recent launch, and its design is more closely linked to ‘big data’ and infrastructure than pixels and pictures.

At a meeting last month, Facebookers explained in great detail what’s coming next in Graph Search — how the whole product is built on a computer-science understanding of people, places, and things as objects with multiple attributes, nodes in three-dimensional space with edges connecting them to one another. And Graph Search is a powerful new paradigm for finding those nodes based on those connections.

“The biggest problem is the result set sizes tend to increase exponentially,” Facebook engineer Mike Curtiss told us in a recent interview.

“If a node is connected to 100 other nodes … you can get 10,000 output nodes. In another round of execution, you get one million output nodes. This is literally an exponential problem, a difficult problem to scale. … You can’t just solve it by throwing more machines at it.”

These dual challenges — Timeline and Graph Search — and their related disciplines of design and engineering, come together with News Feed to represent everything that Facebook is today and will be for the foreseeable future.

Facebook’s financials

We first got wind of the News Feed changes just a few days ago.

Since then, the company’s stock price has seen a measurable uptick:

In the company’s most recent earnings call, we learned that advertising made up 84 percent of the company’s total revenue — $1.33 billion in the last quarter alone, which makes up 13.3 percent of the total online ad market.

Also, mobile revenue made up nearly one quarter of all ad revenue in Q4 — a (relatively) huge $306 million.

In fact, Facebook’s mobile ads — which didn’t even exist mere months ago — have led to a huge boom in the U.S. mobile advertising market.

“With 25 percent of revenue going to mobile in the fourth quarter, Facebook has cemented its position as the leader in mobile display advertising in the U.S. by a wide margin,” an eMarketer analyst told VentureBeat recently via email.

And we Facebook users can’t forget that all this revenue hangs not on Timelines or Graph Search but on News Feed, which remains for now the sole money-maker among Facebook’s all-important three pillars.

Image credit: Jolie O’Dell

When you take a billion people and throw in a few trillion places, things, concepts, attributes, and connections, you get a data set of mind-boggling scope. So when Facebook decided to launch Graph Search last month, it emphasized that the keyword-search paradigm wasn’t gonna cut it this time.

Graph Search was born, then, as object-oriented search, where each person, place, or thing is a node with hundreds or even thousands of attributes, defined as “edges” or connections to other nodes.

Right now, Graph Search is still just five weeks old and has rather limited functionality; Facebook says it’s about one percent complete. For now, you can perform simple queries to find friends of yours who live in a certain place or like certain things.

What Facebook has coming up, however, is much more interesting, complex, and useful.

Let’s take a computer-science detour into the weeds. Edge identifiers — those attributes that show what you, a Facebook node, are connected to — are just numbers. There’s a unique number (between one and nineteen digits long) assigned to each attribute, for example, people who are your friends, people who live in San Francisco, people who like Kanye West, etc. Take a little and operator in Graph Search, and you can search for your friends who live in San Francisco and like Kanye West.

If you read the Facebook Engineering blog post by Lars Rasmussen on how Graph Search works, this is the backbone of Unicorn, the technology behind all Facebook search.

This kind of search is simple. It shows off things you’re already connected to, narrowing down by common attributes or edges — what people like, where they work, whom they know, homing in on specific individuals. It’s like taking a metal detector to a haystack to find the one needle you want.

“But what would be really cool is if we could help people find entirely new haystacks,” said Facebook engineer Mike Curtiss in a meeting today at Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, “to search for things that are not directly connected to them.”

More complex queries require the “apply” operator. This operator “is what makes Graph Search possible,” said Curtiss. It’s not just keyword inputs and outputs; it’s object-oriented search that takes entire nodes in a web as inputs and outputs. Thinking algebraically, it acts as parentheses, allowing you to sort information in very specific ways, filtering and filtering again until you get the single gold nugget you’re panning for.

For example, imagine you’re a high school student in your junior year, starting on college applications, and you want to find friends of friends who went to Harvard to ask for helpful pointers. Or you’re an HR recruiter and want to find photos of your friends (i.e., potential new hires) who like Burning Man (i.e., have a drug and/or performance art problem). Or you want to find Russian restaurants in San Francisco that are liked by people who list Moscow as their hometown.

“We can answer a virtually infinite number of queries, we can answer queries we didn’t even know people would do,” said Curtiss. “There are some limitations, but there’s nothing architecturally preventing it from going really far.

“The biggest problem is the result set sizes tend to increase exponentially. If a node is connected to 100 other nodes … you can get 10,000 output nodes. In another round of execution, you get one million output nodes. This is literally an exponential problem, a difficult problem to scale. … You can’t just solve it by throwing more machines at it.”

That being said, certain Open Compute projects like the radly named Dragonstone server were created with projects like Graph Search in mind.

And until the hardware is perfectly capable of crunching billions of nodes with the greatest of ease, Facebook is using social ranking to show the most relevant or interesting results. Think of it as a combination of Unicorn and the apply operator and EdgeRank (the street name for Facebook’s News Feed-sorting algorithm). “It’s like we have a custom search engine for each user,” Curtiss said.

Once Facebook dumps all the Open Graph data into the mix — way beyond what pages you like, including what you bought, sites you’ve commented on, your online game scores, etc. — the computations get even more complex, the filters for relevance even more clever.

For now, Graph Search is still very much a work in progress, being used by just a few hundred thousand English-speaking users. What is live on Facebook.com today is a baby demo of what Graph Search may eventually become.

Top image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Marcus Thielking is cofounder of Skobbler, a provider of mobile map-based solutions that use OpenStreetMap data.

Map lovers, 2012 was our year.

From Apple unveiling and then apologizing for Apple Maps, to the emergence of the collaborative and crowdsourced OpenStreetMap, for those fascinated by digital mapping technologies, 2012 was a critical point in time. And with location-based services powered by map data expected to reach 1.4 billion users by 2014, you can bet the innovation and competition we witnessed will continue in 2013.

So, what’s next? Here are the top five moments I expect we’ll see in the digital maps space in 2013:

1. OpenStreetMap gets better

With over one million contributors to date, a number that has doubled approximately every 14 months since 2005 and shows no signs of slowing, the OpenStreetMap — affectionately known as the “Wikipedia of maps”— is quickly becoming one of the most popular mapping platforms on the planet. And, the more users lend the project their location expertise, the better OpenStreetMap’s data will ultimately turn out to be. In fact, today, OpenStreetMap has already become the most detailed digital map available in countries like England and Germany. With its ever-increasing user base, the data can only continue to improve. This is hugely important for developers seeking to build their own location-based products and services.

Beyond just being cost effective, OpenStreetMap delivers levels of detail, accuracy (beyond just the street networks) and flexibility not possible with some of the more traditional map players. As the platform advances thanks to user growth, developers in need of mapping data will continue to abandon relationships with guys like Google Maps, TomTom and others, integrating OpenStreetMap data into their own offerings.

2. Apple Maps will get better, too

Apple Maps has been categorized by many as the company’s largest black eye (at least recently). Not only did the app suffer from a data issue, but it was clear the company didn’t have the right team in place building the product, as it couldn’t fully deliver on the fundamentals (like putting bridges in the right places). It was a colossal letdown that led to firings and public apologies, and I guess this should be the case, given this, this, or this. Here’s the thing, though, for all of the criticisms, Apple Maps will only get better.

Whether it will come internally (unlikely), or from the integration with an external mapping party of some sort (see Apple’s rumored acquisition of Waze, although, I think a company like TomTom makes more sense given their base technology and mapping talent), look for Apple to improve on its service. Google knows this and won’t stop updating its own map so as to take full advantage of its head start and ensure that its market position will remain solidified. Apple doubters remember, though – and there are quite a few doubters out there today – the company has long been a bastion of innovation in every arena, so expect the Maps product to slowly find its way back and be a very big player in 2013.

3. Google Maps will lose some of its luster

Apple Maps was the best thing ever to happen to Google Maps. Upon its release, people realized just how valuable Google’s service was through comparison. They also realized how important maps were more generally. For the end-user, the effort and skill required to produce a digital map was, for once, clear. The press for Google was unsurprisingly positive. It couldn’t have asked for a better situation.

However, a mere few months prior, the seemingly unflappable Google was the one on the receiving end, seeing negative press for Google Maps after deciding to charge high-volume users of its maps API. The moment positioned Google as the corporate entity that it is, rather than a driver of innovation. That’s when we started to see defections en masse from Google Maps to the OpenStreetMap, with Foursquare, Wikipedia, and even Apple, leading the charge. While Google has since reversed course, it’s an issue that will crop up again soon and perhaps shift the narrative – in a negative way – for Google.

4. Partnerships to differentiate

For end users interested in a great mapping experience, whether it’s for navigation, direction-finding, and the like, maps can begin to seem redundant. More competition means more mapping services, but it should also mean more originality, allowing one platform to differentiate itself from the next. Google Maps, for instance, has Street View as a feature and is rolling out 3D functionality to stand out from a flood of new challengers. However, in order to be truly unique in an increasingly cluttered space, there are more creative opportunities for map makers to take advantage of, namely through partnerships with other location-based services that are eager to benefit from the scale afforded through map services.

For instance, take Nooly, a startup that allows you to view the weather, in real-time, for any point of interest (it’s location-based via GPS and seems to use Google Maps, currently). Partnering with them and leveraging their API would provide a great end-user benefit and allow a map service to carve out a true point of differentiation relative to other players. I think we’ll see more partnerships like this throughout the year.

5. More maps to come

With mobile proliferation, maps are becoming more and more essential each day, therefore, it only makes sense that more services will pop up, and that more existing companies will want a piece of the pie (Apple entering the fray is really just the beginning). This was especially true in 2012 – think Amazon’s November announcement – and it will only continue in 2013. Could Facebook, for example, enter the mapping space? The recent debut of its Graph Search function could make that a possibility, given location’s centrality to any search platform (and, if Facebook ever does decide to move forward with its own smartphone, a map will be core to that service, as well).

Now, these are just a few possibilities I think we’ll see in the mapping space this year.

Did I miss anything? What do you think will be some of the key map moments in 2013?

photo credit: Carla216 via photopin cc

Marcus Whitney is CTO of Moontoast

I had heard the logic behind Facebook’s defensibility many times before, consistently pointing to the fact that on Facebook, people are their ‘real selves’, not an anonymous troll posting for the community’s enjoyment like on Twitter and Reddit. But it wasn’t until listening to various industry insiders arguing on NPR, on the day of Facebook’s IPO, that had I heard the term that so succinctly describes what they have built, and what anyone who wants to challenge their long-term viability must build: The Identity Infrastructure.

So, when Facebook announced to the world two weeks ago that its Social Graph would now be searchable via Graph Search, it makes the power of Social by Design much more obvious. Sure, Google has added +1 to our searches to add some social context, but Facebook can tell us about our society in dimensions that no other internet company can even begin to. And with each innovation that Facebook releases, marketers and advertisers are watching more closely, understanding that while somewhat raw today, this is undoubtedly the future of marketing and advertising, because of the Identity Infrastructure.

Advertising is just beginning to get disrupted by social — Facebook, especially. Here are three key reasons why social advertising is going to dominate the next decade of online advertising:

1) Identity + attribution

When you combine the ability to know someone completely through a permission based marketing system like Facebook Open Graph Apps, with the new models of attribution tracking that Facebook has recently released, you have a method of ROI calculation that doesn’t have an equal in the traditional online advertising world. The life time value of a purchasing Facebook fan, whom you have access to their graph, is a combined dataset and consumer profile that pre-Facebook would be impossible to create.

2) Mobile

Facebook login runs mobile (Twitter cleans up what Facebook doesn’t own). They don’t need to do a phone. They’re already connected to all our mobile activities, and have the No. 1 mobile app in the world. Facebook was also estimated to have led display mobile advertising with a whopping 18.6% (eMarketer) of the market in revenue. That trend will continue and combining that with the under-evolved state of the mobile advertising market, there is huge upside for Facebook as mobile continues its march to become the primary user experience of consumers.

3) Unmatched targeting

You’ve seen all the hyped up posts about the wacky Graph Searches that people are performing. Can you imaging the type of searches that ad platforms (programmed by Ph.Ds) can do for targeting impressions against the Facebook Graph? Seriously, what ad platform is going to compare to that?

So, while you’re thinking about all the creepy searches you’re gonna do (or hide from in privacy settings) when Graph Search goes live, think about the much larger play… Facebook is just starting to leverage their Identity Infrastructure to completely revolutionize online advertising, bringing about the biggest market disruption since the iPhone.

Social Ad original image via leedsn/Shutterstock

Marcus Whitney is currently the CTO of Boston-based social commerce platform Moontoast, which offers musicians, celebrities, brands and companies a way to turn their social media presence into a source of revenue. He’s founded four startups to date and somehow managed to maintain a love affair with his family, friends and hip-hop. He is a cyborg innovator in Social and Music Startups and a student of Founder Happiness.

Facebook is giving no data love to Yandex, a Russian search engine that launched a social search iOS app today called Wonder. While Wonder lets you ask natural-language queries in a method similar to Facebook’s own Graph Search, the company said the app is not, in fact, a search engine but rather a personal assistant.

The app launched this morning, and according to TechCrunch, it only lasted three hours before Facebook pulled access to its data. The app lets you search across Instagram, Foursquare, Twitter, and earlier in the day, Facebook. You can ask questions like “What are sushi places my friends like?” and it will provide you with a list of restaurants approved by your buddies. The company warned that it was purely experimental and that you’d only be able to ask it questions about places, music, and news at this point.

But Facebook recently released it own search called Graph Search, which does exactly this, only it pulls exclusively from Facebook’s data.

Thinking it could head-off Facebook’s data withholding, the company released a statement saying that it did not consider itself a search engine or directory, therefore it was not in violation of Facebook’s platform policy. Facebook will not let anyone index its data for a directory or search engine without its permission first.

As TechCrunch notes, this decision to block data from Yandex’s Wonder app doesn’t seem to affect the broader Yandex search engine.

You can still use Wonder as per usual. You just may not be able to access as much data as you once could. The two companies are reportedly in conversations about the data.

We have reached out to both Yandex and Facebook and will update upon hearing back.

Hose kink image via Shutterstock

Russian search engine Yandex released its social search app Wonder today — focused entirely on the U.S. market and interestingly timed with Facebook’s own Graph Search Announcement earlier in the month.

Wonder is an iOS app that anyone can use to ask it questions verbally, in natural language. It uses Nuance’s speech-to-text technology in order to facilitate this feature, though it will also let you type out the question if you’re in a place that is too noisy (or you’re too embarrassed to ask it out loud). The app searches across Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and Instagram.

You can ask it questions like “What sandwich shops in New York City do my friends like?” and it will return a list of sandwich shops, with the corresponding names. You can also ask it things like “What news articles have my friends shared?” and it will pull up your friends’ top headlines. Right now, it only supports places, news, and music searches, pulling extra data from sources like Last.fm and Foursquare to give you more data about a place or artist.

The app seems similar to Facebook’s new Graph Search, which doesn’t search any other social networks other than its own. They both focus on discovering things around you through your friends, and the question construction is also very similar.

As TechCrunch notes, the company has provided a legal notice that could head off any aggression from Facebook (such as cutting the company off from its data). Yandex explains that Facebook does not allow anyone to index data for a “search engine or directory.” It argues that Wonder is not a search engine at all, but rather a “personal assistant,” think the iPhone’s Siri.

We have reached out to both Yandex and Facebook and will update upon hearing back.

Wonder image via Yandex

In other words, something totally awesome. Somewhat untested, sure, and somewhat unproven, but totally awesome.

And they called it “Graph Search.”

To most, a graph is a diagram showing the relationship between variable quantities along an X and a Y axis. Graph paper has lots of vertical lines intersected by lots of horizontal lines. Graphs are letters or glyphs or characters.

In other words, they’re totally boring and more than a little geeky.

But Google is supposed to be the geeky company, and Google+ is supposed to be where all the propeller-heads hang out. Facebook, on the other hand is about social, which means it’s about people. Conversations. Connections. In other words, about soft squishy emotional stuff that can’t be reduced to cold calculations and variables and algorithms. Or so, at least, we’d like to believe.

The point?

“Graph Search” is jargon. It’s language for the startup people, the web wonks. Oh, and don’t forget social media gurus and insta-experts. They LOVE geeky stuff like “Social Graph.”

Mom, on the other hand, not so much. Dad? Not him either. In fact, I think I can unscientifically say with virtual certainty that 90 percent of people won’t have a clue what “Social Graph” means or represents.

Which doesn’t matter, on the one hand. After all, it’s us, the people in the know, slapping ourselves on our backs self-congratulatorily with our oh-so-niche knowledge that the term “Social Graph” is for. And we get it, we understand it. Right? Three cheers for us.

But on the other hand, it’s the actual full-on name of the brand-spanking-new “third pillar” (who knew there were even two pillars, before yesterday) of Facebook. One is Timeline, a nice non-geeky name that pretty clearly identifies what it is. The other is News Feed, a prosaic name that — as all good old Anglo-Saxon does — says what it means.

And then you’ve got Graph Search, which won’t be simple or easy to understand at all. And which doesn’t really say in any comprehensible way what it actually is, or does. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Wow. How exciting it is to be able to search a graph.

photo credit: theilr via photopin cc

Well, crap. Facebook launched search and now you have to figure out what is going to show up in searches around the globe. We feel your pain, so we’ve outlined just how privacy works in this crazy, Facebook world.

When the social network announced its Search Graph yesterday, there was one word chief executive Mark Zuckerberg kept repeating: privacy. Rightfully so, as the social network holds information that sometimes you don’t even know is available about you. (Like the fact that your cousin still has that photo of you wearing a bathing suit and holding a wine glass.) The company is trying to mitigate the “surprise factor” by being very up front with what kind of content you’ll be able to search.

“No one can see anything that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to see,” said Facebook public policy manager Nicky Jackson Colaco in an interview with VentureBeat. “We don’t want people to be surprised. It’s really bad for them … and it’s bad for us.”

Don’t get surprised.

Facebook is like a safe containing a ton of your personal information — which you’ve purposefully and willfully cracked with an axe.  There, we have our photo albums; address books; calendars; lists of our friends; lists of our interests; political beliefs; religious reliefs; sexual orientations; hometowns and current addresses; family members; significant others; baby announcements; contact information; the schools we attended; the places we’ve visited; the stores we love; the websites we read; and, on top of it all, our daily, up-to-the-minute thoughts.

Individually, that all sounds fine. Why should I care who knows that I’m a little obsessed with Pinterest and would live in an Anthropologie showroom if given the opportunity? But in aggregate, that data gets scary.

This is where people may start being surprised with search. For example, individually, your interests aren’t that bad. So, you liked a group called “Big Titties.” If that shows up on a news feed, maybe your friends will laugh and then move on with their days. But when it shows up — as Gizmodo realized — in a searchable list of “people who like Big Titties,” or Kinky Sex, or “Hating When Black People Say Things That You Can’t Understand!” and that gets publicized, your interest in large mammaries may deflate.

The only way to protect yourself from this is to go through your profile and find out what groups you’re in. See something you might not want the whole world to know about? Delete it! The same goes for photos, videos, and any other aspect of your profile.

When is something really, truly deleted?

As we all saw with Facebook’s last round of privacy changes, when you “delete” something off your Timeline, it’s not actually deleted. So, how do you make sure that something is really, truly gone? Use the Activity Log.

“Just to clarify, anything you delete from the site is deleted,” said Colaco. “Activity Log is really the place [to delete content]. It’s a summary of you on Facebook.”

In other words, if you want something gone, delete it using the Activity Log, not the Timeline.

The Activity Log shows you all of the things you’ve done on any given day and allows you to either change the privacy setting of that “activity” or delete it once and for all. It is organized into content categories such as your posts, posts you’re tagged in, posts by others (on your Timeline), photos, likes, comments, things on your About page, friends, notes, games, and a ton more.

It is utterly useful, albeit not exactly intuitive, which is one of my main criticisms about Facebook privacy. Take some time to play with its buttons and options.

Activity Log will also break some of these categories down into what you’ve posted and what has been posted by a friend. If you don’t like what your buddy has posted, it gives you avenues to ask that friend to remove content. If the content is yours, you can click a drop down menu to the right of the piece of content and click delete.

Then it is gone, and it is not searchable.

So, what can be searched?

Anything that you make public or that you have shared with the specific person doing the searching. For example, if I share a picture of me at one of VentureBeat’s conferences and set the privacy level to “public” (meaning I want all one billion Facebook users to be able to see that picture), then it is searchable and will be found by anyone searching for “Photos of Meghan Kelly.”

If I post a photo that I want only VentureBeat reporter Jolie O’Dell to see, and I set the privacy to “Jolie O’Dell,” then only she will be able to see that photo in a search.

Let’s get a little more complicated. If I share with the whole world that I went to George Washington University but have made the fact that I like the movie Drumline available to “only me,” then I will not show up in a search for “People who went to George Washington University who like Drumline.”

Why? Because Facebook doesn’t consider me a match for that search query unless I am happy to boast about both my GWU attendance and my Nick Canon drumming-love in a public forum. (He really did a stand-up job in that movie.)

Are the search queries kept by Facebook?

Yes, but only for a period of time. Colaco stressed that the policies for Facebook’s previous search have not changed in this new iteration. Facebook will still keep the searches for some time, as outlined in its Data Use Policy. Most search engines do save queries, however, so if you use Google, don’t get too bent out of shape about Facebook saving the same kind of data.

You can also see what you’ve searched for in your Activity Log. Colaco told me that these previous searches do not show up on your Timeline or in News Feeds, however. This just shows up in your Activity Log so you can know what you’ve been up to.

Can I opt out?

Nope.

“There’s no opt-out or anything like that,” said Colaco. “As Mark [Zuckerberg] said yesterday, this is really sort of the third pillar of what Facebook is all about.”

So…

Start sifting.

You’re probably going to be surprised by Facebook search. You won’t realize what is public about you because there is so much information posted by friends that you don’t even pay attention to. Now’s the time to get smart about what people post about you and what you post about yourself.

If you’re afraid that you’ll miss something — such as if a friend “checks you in” at the restaurant you just arrived at or tags a photo of you — you can tell Facebook not to publish those pieces of content to your Timeline until you’ve approved them. Just go to the “Timeline and Tagging Settings” in your privacy settings and turn on “Review posts friends tag you in before they appear on your Timeline.”

Keep in mind, however, that this content will automatically be published to news feeds and it will be searchable, but it won’t publish to your Timeline immediately. While it doesn’t protect you from being embarrassed by a photo you’re tagged in, it will help you keep tabs on what content is associated with you. (Thanks to commenter Anna for pointing this out!)

For now, the Graph Search is still in beta, so you have a little time before the world will be able to look for your content.

(Got any other questions about Facebook Graph Search? Put them in the comments and I’ll do my best to get the answers.)

Wedding Crashers art courtesy of New Line Cinema

At least, that’s what Chris Winfield believes. He’s the cofounder and chief marketing officer of BlueGlass Interactive, a digital marketing agency with Fortune 1000 clients such as Disney, eBay, and the NFL.

I chatted with him today about Facebook, Graph Search, and Google.

VentureBeat: Let’s start generally: What was your first reaction to Graph Search?

Winfield: For me, one of the most interesting things was the way they announced Graph Search. It was understated, there was no livestream, no partnership with CNN, and it wasn’t in a huge venue. They’re really under-promising, saying it’s not a search engine, it’s not Yelp, and we’d love to work with Google if they want to.

To me, that’s a bigger sign that they are in fact looking to compete in search.

But Facebook has a partnership with Microsoft, and you can bet they’ve really looked at how hard its been for anyone to compete with Google. They’ve watched Microsoft pour billions into search and barely make a dent.

VentureBeat: So how would they compete?

Winfield: To start, all they want to do is get people comfortable with making some searches on Facebook … starting to get something they can’t get anywhere else.

The most important thing for Facebook is they just have to get people comformtable with finding a couple of things, and then what we’ll start to see is the evolution of it as they build it out. One goal will be to get more and more businesses to stop caring so much about Google Local.

And then, over time, search and being able to control that experience will become fundamental to Facebook and especially to their advertising platform.

VentureBeat: Let’s talk about Facebook and advertising. How does this help?

Winfield: Everything for Facebook ads right now is based on guesses about what you’re interested in, but search became the most effective advertising engine of all time because people are directly looking for something … you see the intent.

That said, the holy grail is personalization: The more the platform knows about you — what you’re looking for, and what you’re likely to not just click on but also take some kind of action about — the better. Which is why Google has not just focused on being the best search engine but [has] added the personalization that is so important.

Now, from the Facebook point of view, if an advertiser can bid on terms related to your business — and friends have liked that business — that’s the Holy Grail. There’s a long way to go, but if you can put intent and what you like and who you are together, that is very, very powerful.

VentureBeat: Where’s the biggest conflict?

Winfield: Initially, they’re going to position this as if there are no conflicts — we’re completely different, we’re solving the people search problem.

But they’re almost trying to change how people think about search. Googling something is obvious and standard now — Google has it locked up. But when Facebook is talking about natural language search and changing how search is done socially, that’s key.

In my experience, as soon as someone says we’re not really competing with you, that’s when you get really scared. For example, TripAdvisor — you have this partnership and you think you’re safe — but now that’s at risk. Or Bing, frankly. There’s no way that partnership lasts very long. As soon as Facebook thinks they have something that works better, it’s gone.

Facebook doesn’t need to come in and be the dominant search site. They just need to start chipping away.

VentureBeat: Let’s talk about the advertising potential here.

Winfield: That plays back to Facebook’s whole overall messaging: We know we have the audience, we know that advertisers want to spend more with us, and we know they’re not spending as much as they want to because they’re not seeing the same results as elsewhere (like AdWords).

Facebook doesn’t really need to convince advertisers, they just need to create the product and get people using it. And then they’ll have advertisers lining up around the block.

VentureBeat: Is this perhaps the first really serious challenge for Google?

Winfield: Yes, because Facebook has over a billion users. And it’s not just like a Yahoo home page with a billion visitors; these people actually have accounts and are actually logging in.

So Facebook has the opportunity to grab those people’s attention – that’s what makes this different.

VentureBeat: What should Google do?

Winfield: Really, Google should just keep doing what they’re doing.

The big question for Google is: How do you incentivize people more, or give people reasons to spend more time with Google? It’s not about being the next Facebook, it’s about trying to control more and more of people’s experience. Which is why Google is integrating everything.

For Google, it’s about how they convince people that they have the best search engine. If you’re able to find what you’re looking for and are finding what you need, you won’t leave.

photo credit: Tom.Bricker via photopin cc

Facebook released its Graph Search today, but sadly, this is only available in beta, and the public won’t have access to it for some time. We got some 1-on-1 time with the search to show you just what you can look forward to.

Search is easy and unobtrusive. The bar sits hidden at the top of your Facebook page in a big, blue bar. When you are on your news feed page, the bar will say, “Search for people, places and things” in opaque text. When you’re on your page, or a friends page, the name of that person’s profile will appear in the blue bar. You’re still able to click it and immediately start typing your query.

When you start typing your questions, Facebook will suggest search queries and clean up your question. You might ask, “Which of my friends like The White House?” and it will simplify and suggest “My friends who like The White House.”

The search could be most useful for situations like finding friends in a specific city you plan on visiting or finding people who like a band you’ve got an extra ticket to see. You can also use it to search for things “nearby.” If you’re looking for friends who live near your current location, you can look for “friends nearby.” If you need a hospital, you should call 911, but you could also search on Facebook, and it shows you the hospitals in your area  (while you’re bleeding out, of course).

I really like the feature that lets you look at all the pictures you’ve previously commented on, or previously liked. It helps recall old memories, or locate photos you may want to disappear.

The unfortunate part is that you can’t search for queries such as “Which of my friends are selling tickets in San Francisco?” or “Which friends are sick?” For example, the app Help, I Have the Flu searches your Facebook feed for posts that include the words “sneezes,” “flu,” or “coughs.” It’ll happily send a message out to your friends letting them know to send you soup because you’re stuck in Tissue Town.

Zuckerberg said that the engineers have lot of feature that they want to include in the next release, including indexing more data on Facebook. Perhaps that means we’ll be able to search status content some day.

The web search function isn’t that bad, but I don’t see people using it very often. Whether you’re a Bing lover or not, the web search function feels more like a supplement to the Graph Search in the last case scenario where you’re not able to get what you need from Facebook’s results. Browsers today come with easily accessible search bars too, making it an unnecessary step to open Facebook to grab a quick bit of information not specific to your friends circle. Of course, Facebook acknowledged that this wasn’t meant to be a web search product, and said the partnership with Bing was not exclusive.

If you do, however, want to access web search, you can, well, search for it and click on the web search icon. Facebook’s search can still be used for traditional queries such as finding a friend or brand profile.

Currently, 90 percent of small businesses are on Facebook, but only a third of these actually post to the site more than a couple times a week, and another third want to spend even less time on social media. That may need to change with Facebook’s new graph search.

At least, if you want your local business to grow.

The Complete Small Business Marketing Guide used to have about one page: Advertise in Yellow Pages. For the past couple of years, though, it has included Facebook, blogging, Google-friendliness, Twitter, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, not mention mobile ads and SMS marketing campaigns.

But with graph search, all of this could change. Or become much less effective.

Facebook’s new graph search is going to allow Facebook’s billion-plus members to easily and quickly find the best local businesses – according to their friends, and other locals. Restaurants, dentists, doctors, or carpenters: Facebook will highlight the services and businesses that your friends like, use, comment on, and respond to. Facebook has a billion-plus members who have uploaded 240 billion photos and created over a trillion connections between themselves — and with businesses.

“It’s nice to see … any tool that makes it easier for the local business to be found is good for local businesses,” says Mike Lyman, a local marketing expert. “It’s another reason for a local business to have a Facebook page — some have been shying away because of the ROI, the investment in time.”

Graph search is a big deal — and a big shift for local search.

Local businesses have already jumped on the social bandwagon, but now it’s not just about presence. And it’s not just about doing it because everyone else is doing it. Now, it’s about maximizing social visibility — social media optimization — just as smart businesses have worked for years on search engine optimization.

No likes? It’ll be hard to appear in social search. And while fake likes from users in Kazakstan might make you look good on the outside, they won’t translate to business because they won’t be truly local. Lots of likes but no interactions? Again, it’ll be hard to gain visibility when local people search for the best businesses. Facebook will be looking at a wide variety of social signals when determining what to show users in response to their queries.

What’ll work?

“Being active, having good content, and participating regularly are all key,” Lyman says. “It’s now beyond the like … you need to engage your customers somehow and get them to participate. Increasing your engagement will increase your visibility, so interactivity is the key.”

In other words, local businesses that have been dedicated to growing a loyal, responsive fanbase by both doing great work and being active in engaging local people via Facebook are best positioned to win at the new social media optimization.

photo credit: Porter Novelli Global via photopin cc

Facebook released its latest social graph feature Graph Search today, but it seems investors found the announcement lackluster.

The social network invited press to the mystery media event on January 8, when the stock was sitting around $29 a share. The announcement caused the stock to pop up to over $30 a share, the first time it’s broken out of the $20s since July. Investors, interested in a new way to make money off of Facebook, pumped the shares further up to a high of $32, but the lack of information about a monetization strategy or advertising in search caused the stock to remain in the red. It closed today at $30.10 a share, down 2.74 percent.

At the end of the event, Facebook’s stock had fluctuated between a one and two percent drop, hovering for the majority of the launch event.

Facebook’s Graph Search allows anyone to search using natural language on Facebook. It intends to answer your questions, as opposed to providing you links to the answers like a traditional search engine. For example, you can ask “Who lives in New York and likes baseball?” and it will provide you with a list of people who fit those credentials.

The company also deepened its partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine, bringing Bing web search results in-line with Facebook’s search results (just in case you didn’t find what you were looking for). But Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s founder and chief executive, impressed upon us that the relationship is not exclusive.

“We would love to work with Google. When we did our Bing web search integration, we were very public about the fact that this wasn’t a thing that we were trying to do with Bing. We’re trying to make search social in general,” he said. “We’d want to work with any web search company — as long as the companies are willing to honor the privacy of the folks who are sharing the content on Facebook. And we haven’t quite worked that out yet.”

Unfortunately, Zuckerberg stressed that this product is in its early stage and didn’t give much information regarding monetization. When asked about how the search will start making money for Facebook, Zuckerberg skirted the topic, saying that the engineers are currently focused on building out the best product they can.

Zuckerberg promised that this is just the first beta, “B-1″ of the Graph Search, and that we can expect to see mobile support soon, as well as new languages (it’s only available in English for now) and more indexed content.

As far as whether Instagram data will eventually make its way into this feature, Zuckerberg said, “That should be on the list of things that we’ll hopefully one day get to.”

FB data by YCharts

Mark Zuckerberg image via Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

Yelp’s stock price dropped by as much as eight percent following the announcement of Facebook’s “Graph Search,” which could help users connect more easily with businesses your friends like.

Facebook’s Graph Search is aimed at helping you find things easier and make new connections. For example, it could help you find new restaurants, with queries such as “New York City restaurants my friends like” or “Restaurants my friends have visited.” If Graph Search works well, it could give people less incentive to use Yelp to find new places to eat. Likes are much lower-fidelity than reviews, but the new search option should still concern Yelp and other businesses.

Yelp opened the day trading at $21.97, but the company’s stock at one point sat at $20.10, a drop of 8.5 percent. Yelp gained a little a bit back at the end of trading today, but it still closed at $20.67, a drop of 5.9 percent.

Check out Yelp’s intra-day performance in the chart below.

YELP data by YCharts

Top photo via sylvar/Flickr

The new search feature will be interesting for people who just want to find out interesting things about their friends or get together a Tolkien-loving crowd for an LOTR video-watching marathon. But what it’s really going to do is open up the vast hoard of Facebook data and eat the lunch of a thousand large and small companies that make money by aggregating and rating what people do and where they go.

Here are just a few examples:

Yelp

Yelp is essentially a social business directory with ratings, strong in entertainment industries like restaurants and bars, but growing in local services like home and automotive and beauty. Now Facebook’s Graph Search will let a billion-plus people type in search queries like: ”Restaurants in San Francisco liked by Culinary Institute of America graduates.”

Likes are much lower-fidelity than reviews, but still: watch out, Yelp. (Yelp’s stock just tanked.)

TripAdvisor

I guess having a partnership with Facebook and being one of the first travel sites to integrate with Facebook’s “instant personalization” back in 2011 is not enough to stop Facebook from competing with you.

All that new local search capability that competes with Yelp is also relevant to TripAdvisor. Hotels in New York that my friends like? Most popular vacation destinations in North America?

And it’s not just about what you and your friends like — Facebook explicitly referenced ”Bars in Dublin liked by people who live in Dublin,” which is a promising way to find the places locals like, explore the world, and find the best places to visit.

Plus, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump from that to full-on booking the hotel or setting up a reservation with the restaurant, all within Facebook.

Yellow Pages (and any other local search apps)

OK, so maybe the printed Yellow Pages are passé.

But millions still visit YellowPages.com, which had over 30 million unique visitors just last month. Once there, they’re looking for dentists and carpenters and mechanics and decorators and roofing companies: all the local services that haven’t, by and large, adopted Facebook pages and hard-core social media campaigns yet.

Now Facebook will let you find ”Dentists liked by my friends,” and any other service category you can think of. RIP single-function local search sites and apps?

Apple’s Siri

The least of what Siri does is help you phone Mommy without dialing.

The vision for Siri is that as a full-fledged personal assistant, she can help you book hotels, get a restaurant reservation, and find you the best information about what to do and where to go. Siri is a key part of how Apple is fighting Google’ dominance in search.

But now Graph Search from Facebook has the potential to get better answers and find more relevant places, because it has access to a wealth of data Siri can never see.

Can you imagine Facebook releasing a companion app sometime with natural spoken language support and booking deals in place with entertainment, travel, and service industries? I can.

And, of course, Google

Google is the king of search, but Facebook took a little potshot at the giant today by talking about the “difference between web search and Graph Search,” saying that Graph Search is designed to “show you the answer and not links to answers.”

The hope for Facebook here is that if users can search for all the things they want and need inside Facebook; they will never need to leave. And Google, with its Facebook-wannabe Google+, will be starved of searches and then starved of revenue.

. . .

More companies than these will feel the impact of today’s Graph Search announcement, I’m sure. Add your thoughts in the comments.

But one caveat: Until we can get our hands on Graph Search and play with it hard, it’ll be tough to tell how much of this is real and and how much is potential.

One thing is for sure. It’s going to be interesting.

Image credit: Meghan Kelly

Facebook announced its ambitious new Graph Search this morning, but even more intriguing to me was a slightly minor side-announcement: The company is also relying on Microsoft’s Bing for web searches within Facebook.

Bing already integrated Facebook into its social search function last year, so it makes sense that Facebook looked to Microsoft when it needed a search partner. The deal can be traced back to Microsoft’s strategic $240 million investment in Facebook in 2007, which has led to a close relationship between the two companies. With Google as a common enemy, Facebook and Microsoft need to show a united front when it comes to search and social.

But try as Microsoft might, Bing still holds only 16.3 percent of the U.S. search market, compared to Google’s 66.7 percent, according to the most recent data from Comscore. Bing has also powered Yahoo’s search in the U.S. since 2010, and it’s on track to completely replace Yahoo’s search globally.

By putting Bing right within Facebook, Microsoft will have access to searches from the social networks’ more than 1 billion users. And perhaps the best thing for Microsoft is that most of those users likely won’t even realize they’re making a Bing search. Without Bing’s stigma holding it back (many consumers may still find a Microsoft search engine “uncool”), it will likely end up generating a significant amount of search traffic via Facebook.

One journalist at today’s event asked if Facebook had considered a similar search deal with Google. Everyone in the room, including Zuckerberg, erupted into laughter. Zuckerberg later added that he would love to work with Google — but it doesn’t sound like that’s going to happen anytime soon.

This morning, Facebook gathered a handful of press at its Menlo Park campus to announce it’s finally rolling out a functional search tool — a tool that’s been more than one year in the making.

Called Graph Search, Facebook’s offering will play on its strengths, allowing you to find people, places, and information based on human connections.

For example, it’ll make it easy for you to find friends of friends who are single women. Or friends who work at Microsoft’s San Francisco office. Or Austin restaurants your friends liked, or photos of your friends in Paris, or friends of yours who like both Twilight and Nickelback (so you can unfriend them).

“We’re taking a trip back to our roots,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “This is one of the coolest things we’ve done in a while.”

The new Graph Search is not available to the public, but Facebook has made a very limited bit available for testing: You can “try a search” to see friends who live in your city. For access to the beta test, you need to join a waiting list.

Zuckerberg said Graph Search is, along with news feed and Timeline, one of the social network’s three main pillars.

The graph we’re talking about includes a billion people, 240 billion photos, and 1 trillion connections — all indexed for public search that’s also privacy-aware. With the new feature, you can only search content that’s been shared with you, specifically.

And all of that privacy, Zuck said, is a huge engineering task. “About 10 percent of our computing is spent on privacy checks,” said Zuckerberg. “This is infrastructure we’ve been building up over years.”

He continued to emphasize that Facebook’s Graph Search is going to be quite different from Google or Bing web search. “In general, web search is designed to … return links that may have answers to the questions that you’re trying to ask. Graph Search is designed to return the answer, not links that might get you to the answer.”

In that moment, the young CEO put his company in direct competition with Google’s most widely used product. But Graph Search, he said, is a smarter machine — the kind of natural language, smart search engine others have been trying to build all along.

“We came up with something we think is a lot more natural,” he said.

Here’s how it works: You type a query into the familiar search box, and a drop-down menu appears, showing categories that Graph Search understands — people, places, pictures, the kind of stuff we already know Facebook is good at.

Then, you can use pretty natural language, such as, “Who are my friends in Portland?” or “Museums in Washington, DC, my friends have been to.” Results are ranked based on social signals (likes, comments, etc.) as well as general content.

Here are a couple of sneak-peek shots of the product in action:

Don’t expect to see full Graph Search publicly rolled out any time soon, though. People, photos, places, and interests are the four query categories Facebook is indexing first. The beta product will come slowly with plenty of notification — and plenty of opportunities for you to get rid of or hide content you don’t want your friends or other Facebook users to be able to search for.

“It’s gonna take years and years to index everything,” Zuckerberg said. “There’s more content we haven’t gotten to than content we have.” Search for mobile, more languages, text posts, and Open Graph content will be coming soon. And, of course, an API is also on the roadmap, but perhaps a bit further down the line.

Monetization in the form of ads is coming, but Zuck said the company is focusing first on getting the product out of its initial beta version.

“It was a big engineering challenge to index all of that data in the first place,” said a product lead during the Q&A portion of today’s press conference. “It’s an enormous amount of data. Just the engineering work of building out that software … it’s taken us more than a year to do that.”

The rollout will start with U.S., English-speaking users. To get on the waitlist now, check out early registration. On that page, you can also get some use cases and personalized demos with the “Try A Search” link.

In anticipation of the news, which was hinted at in an invitation a few days ago, investors are growing more optimistic about the company. Facebook stock has risen to its highest price in months and is trading at $31.43 as of this writing.

Let’s not forget to follow the money; all that engineering and infrastructure work wasn’t just to delight all you users. Search makes up the largest portion of U.S. digital advertising spending, a grand total of $17.58 billion in 2012, according to research firm eMarketer.

And right now, the lion’s share of that market belongs to King Google, which grabbed 74.5 percent of U.S. search revenues last year. That statistic has been growing over the past year, not declining in spite of Bing’s best efforts.

A reporter in today’s audience asked Zuckerberg, “Was there even a consideration of working with Google [on graph search]?” Everyone in the room, including Zuckerberg, erupted into uncomfortable laughter. It was akin to asking two starving people fighting over the same steak if the one would lend the other a knife.

Ads make up the vast majority of Facebook’s revenue, but a lackluster search feature has hindered some of the network’s ability to place ads not only based on general interest but also based on the timing and intent of the user.

So to continue to compete in the cutthroat war for online revenue, Facebook had to release a search product — and it has to eventually prove it’s better than Google web search if the still-young social network wants to win the war.