Why Facebook’s Graph Search Doesn’t Matter

Last week Facebook launched another new feature, Graph Search. When I heard the name my eyes glazed over – it sounded far too like a high school math class to me. In many ways it is. There have already been hundreds of posts about the amazing new feature, how it will empower, enhance and otherwise improve the lives of those using Facebook. Except it won’t.

Facebook and other tech companies have, in recent years, fallen into the habit of solving problems no one has. Facebook Graph Search is yet another example of that. Of course marketers are all excited about the prospect of being able to find more people on Facebook, especially via their interests and those who make a living via networking and selling affiliate type programs are no doubt excited about the opportunities to plague more people with their messages.

But for the average Facebook user, those with that magic number of 130 connections or less, they could care less. Even the geekiest of them. My girlfriend is a geek, she is not only a geek but a math geek, she can do things with numbers in her head that I still can’t manage on a calculator. I often use a combination of her and a friend of mine who is the same age as me and only three months ago got an email account, as my acid tests for whether Social Media is progressing or simply becoming more “inside baseball”.

Let’s take my girlfriend first. She uses Facebook to stay caught up with family and friends, to post pictures that make her laugh that she finds on Pinterest, to stay in touch via Facebook messenger with my daughters (who knows what they scheme over in those messages!) but the one thing she isn’t looking for is to grow her network, she has no need to. If she wants to make friends with someone she does it in person. Now my friend with the new email account. He has looked at Facebook, his wife uses it in much the same way as my girlfriend, but he sees no advantage to it in his life, I doubt he will ever have a Facebook account. Personally I’ve spent the last six months culling connections from Facebook and have reduced the size of my network by almost 50% to absolutely no detriment. In fact the experience is much improved.

So who is Graph Search for? It is for those inside Social Media. That is the problem, Facebook, Google et al are producing products for people who are in the industry, not the average users. Those in the industry and by the “industry” I mean those making a living at least tangentially connected with the internet, are easily impressed by new features, things they believe will make their experience better, but that is because they spend the majority of their days on sites like Facebook. The reality is that the real majority of Facebook users don’t spend all that time on the site.

I’d rather see Facebook improving the mobile version of their site, making it something stable and useable than rolling out more “meta features” that serve only to feed the echo chamber of Social Media guru’s trying to convince the world that it can’t live without Social Media.

Are you excited to see Facebook Graph Search?

I'm glad you took the time to read this post.


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