Facebook’s efforts to acquire satellite navigation startup Waze in a deal potentially valued at as high as $1 billion have hit a major roadblock, as Israeli daily newspaper Calcalist reported that Waze’s co-founders and CEO are balking at the shuttering of the company’s development center in Israel and the relocation of some of its employees to the social network’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.
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Recently, Facebook began rolling out a global redesign of its mobile location pages. The intention of this redesign seems to be focused not only on making it easier to find business’ physical locations, but also simplifying interactions between users and businesses on Facebook mobile.
When Facebook announced Graph Search earlier this year, the natural question was, “When will this be on mobile?” It appears that Facebook is trying to push more search queries onto its mobile application (instead of apps such as Foursquare and Yelp). As Inside Facebook Editor Brittany Darwell noticed recently, Facebook changed the name of its Nearby feature on its iOS app to Local Search.
Facebook’s Graph Search has several uses, such as looking up restaurants in Tokyo that your friends like, or seeing photos that they’ve posted from San Francisco. You can also use it as a dating site, looking up men or women who are friends of friends and meet your criteria. But can Graph Search make you money? That’s what Neo Mammalian Studios and Advantage Capital Funds wanted to find out, in an infographic posted on sister site SocialTimes.
Facebook’s graph search, which is slowly being rolled out to more people, has major implications for brands. It could change the way that companies advertise not only on Facebook, but in their brick-and-mortar stores, too. Mark Simmons, co-founder and managing partner of Mixed Digital, spoke with AllFacebook about how companies can get their pages ready for graph search — taking both a digital and tangible approach.
What is that makes Facebook’s graph search tick? The entity graph — Facebook’s set of place-specific data. Every time users are prompted to describe a little more about places where they checked in, that’s the entity graph at work. It’s Facebook’s way of making sure the real world comes across accurately on the social network. Mashable recently took a look at what the entity graph is and how it fits into graph search.
Facebook is the big bang in the universe of social networking. Sure, MySpace and LiveJournal had slightly better than primordial existences before the days of Mark Zuckerberg, but they never held a candle to Facebook’s massive user base, and they weren’t nearly as ubiquitous as the social network quickly became.
Facebook’s newest addition — graph search — can change the way brands not only market on the site, but find potential customers through the social network, provided they’re savvy enough. Graph search takes the recommendation power of Yelp and combines it with Facebook’s tremendous social graph to make it more important for businesses to cater to their Facebook fans and brick-and-mortar customers.
Ever since Facebook Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed the topic of search at TechCrunch Disrupt in September, industry experts have been wondering what the social network would do. The answer is Facebook’s graph search — a tool that combines Web searching with the connections that users have on the site. It’s a powerful tool that can be used by people looking for photos of friends, connections, dentists, restaurants, movies, or pretty much anything else. This new utility can challenge Google, Yelp — and even Match.com.
Ever since Facebook acquired his location-based check-in site, Gowalla, around this time last year, co-founder and CEO Josh Williams (now a product manager of pages, locations, and events at Facebook) has been building the next phase of local-social discovery. Despite a roller-coaster year that brought the check-in industry plenty of ups and downs and a fair share of speculation as to what would come next, the scope of the new location project remained under wraps, until now. Last month, Facebook announced, to much fanfare, the release of a bundle of new and updated features collectively known as Nearby.
