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> This is huge. Huge!

Quite the opposite, in my opinion. People don't like being bothered by strangers on Facebook. It's weird and creepy, especially so when it's a guy contacting a girl. This could be seen as a disincentive to share if you don't want your face popping up on search results for people outside your immediate network.

It also makes friends who are ignorant or careless about privacy more of a liability. If they tag you in something that's set to 'public', that thing could now be seen by far more strangers far more frequently. There's no good solution to this: You can harrass your friends about their tagging habits, waste countless hours un-tagging yourself every month, or delete your profile altogether.

I could see it being useful if you could give it commands. Something like: "Invite all friends who like Game of Thrones to my Game of Thrones Event on Sunday at 8PM". Then again, that could just increase the amount of noise on Facebook and drive people away even faster.

> People don't like being bothered by strangers

People love being bothered by strangers. Just try it. Make any half-funny observation about the world around you to a random stranger in the line, at the hairdresser... just not when they're actively doing something. Weather the surprise, repeat what you said if necessary, allow them to come up with a response. If they don't, follow through yourself.

At first it seems like you're a crazy person talking at others. But after a minute (though it'll feel like a little longer) most people will happily talk to you.

And don't think of it as "bothering". You're diverting your precious attention to them. The thing that every website and channel on the planet wants from you.

That used to be just normal, polite behaviour BTW.

You know, there's a difference between 'introverts' and 'extraverts'; those people who stand around and feel awkward if no one is saying anything?

You know? The ones who want to talk to you in elevators? Or just come and stand next your desk while you're trying to do work and talk? All socionormative, smile and handshake?

Maybe you should watch this: http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts....

Here's a thing: If I dont know you, and you want a conversation, catch my eye. If I smile, sure, lets chat.

If I look away, look at my phone, stare out the window.

dont talk to me

Your social obligation to engage is unwelcome

In all seriousness; you need to re-evaluate if you honestly believe "People love being bothered by strangers."

Some people may; many do not. You enjoy bothering strangers. There's a difference.

There's no need to attack him because you assume that he's not empathetic to others or is incapable of reading body language.

I really hope this "introvert fad" slows down soon. There's no need to be so radical, there's a spectrum of personality types. It's not black and white. I identify as an introvert. Social situations exhaust me, so I enjoy them sparingly.

If someone makes a funny comment to me in the elevator, I'll laugh and it's okay. I don't rant to him about my being a recluse.

Thing is, introverts are vastly outnumbered in society. So while his statement is generalizing, it is a good approximation to Facebook's population.

So, for Facebook it doesn't matter. As they always do, first they create something that is seen as violating people's notion of privacy. Then they add some form of setting that allows the introverts and control-freaks like you and me that makes it enough for us to not abandon the site, but at the same time allows to still be users.

Also, there is something funny about how you mention not liking to be bothered by strangers in an Internet forum with 10^6 users, but I digress.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-f...

One fourth to a less than a half is not "vastly outnumbered".

PS Or even slightly more than a half: http://www.thoughtful-self-improvement.com/percentage-of-int...

http://www.quietlyfabulous.com/2011/01/06/introverts-arent-a...

Here's the cliff notes: “But in 1998, researchers were finally able to do what Isabel Briggs Myers could not: an actual population study. The study was based on a national representative sample – 3,009 randomly selected individuals – which, through weighting of underrepresented groups, was made to approximate the distribution of the 1990 U.S. Census. The findings were clear: introverts and extroverts are equally represented in the population.” (emphasis in original)

Honestly, I consider myself extremely introverted, and I do all those things to avoid talking to people, but I kind of wish I didn't. I actually like random people talking to me about random things.

Maybe you're not really that introvert, only a little shy? (yes, I think there's a difference :)

I don't think being an introvert means you don't like talking to people.

I am definitely extremely shy (in person), but I think I'm also very introverted but wish I wasn't.

I regret that I have but one upvote to give.

> At first it seems like you're a crazy person talking at others. But after a minute (though it'll feel like a little longer) most people will happily talk to you.

Yes - but if you watch very carefully you'll notice their eyes darting nervously about, trying to find the nearest exit, and a small frown appear as they attempt to calculate the whether staying in the line is worth it, and the likelihood of you attempting to sell them something or attempt violence if you make your excuses.

In other words - if some random guy starts talking to you in a line, you will tend to make small-talk in return. Whether you like it or not.

That is not my experience at all. Sure, some people will feel uncomfortable, but it shows right away, and I stop. Some people are more open and return the joke, keep the conversation going, etc

That's always nice, for everyone involved (or so I like to think).

Sounds like you are unpleasant for other reasons. Typically, though certainly not always, when I engage random strangers in small talk I see smiles if I engage them confidently with something a little more interesting than "how's the weather". YMMV, etc

You just sound bitter.

.... Wait for it :)

Edit: I'll take your downvotes, but know that there's a joke there you're just not getting.

There are many differences between that scenario and the equivalent on Facebook. Two critical ones:

- the interaction is of a short, definite length. I will probably never see you again if I don't want to.

- the number of real-life encounters I can have in a day are limited by my location in space and time. it's fun to have that happen once a day; I imagine the joy wears off when it's happening 30 times.

For me there is a different between strangers that "found" you directly and strangers that "found" you indirectly, like from graph search. Somehow you can understand more when you meet them directly, although sometime maybe you'll feel unsafe when strangers start "bothering" you.

I kindof get the feeling facebook conveys an autistic interpretation of human social interactions.

"Autistic Social Software" http://www.danah.org/papers/Supernova2004.html

Doesn't talk about FB, as it wasn't yet a dominant force yet.

At first I read that as altruistic, and I was going to agree. In fact, I think that's a more accurate statement than autistic... or perhaps just more optimistic.

This is exactly what I was thinking. I had about 5 seconds of thinking that this was very intriguing. But then I stopped thinking about it abstractly and imagined it in the context of my life. I just can't think of any situation where my desire to connect with a stranger would be stronger than my aversion to attempting to do so. I feel awkward, creepy, and a little unsafe just imagining it. And the feeling is multiplied when I imagine being on the other end.

>If they tag you in something that's set to 'public', that thing could now be seen by far more strangers far more frequently. There's no good solution to this: You can harrass your friends about their tagging habits, waste countless hours un-tagging yourself every month, or delete your profile altogether.

You can also change your profile settings so you have to approve all posts you are tagged in before the tag can be viewed by the public. I've found this to work a lot better for me than untagging

I seem to recall that many moons ago, I set up my privacy settings to prevent others from tagging me in photos.

Revisiting it just now, the options in that section of Privacy are now fairly byzantine, but I think I still have it locked down :-)

>People don't like being bothered by strangers on Facebook

This is true, however the fact that you can search friends of friends means you can look for people you might want to get to know better, and get introduced via your mutual friend. Or be bold and just send them a friend request with a little note, etc.

A friend of a friend is less of a random person than the current facebook search which is actually random.

Obviously it will be abused by some, however I think it is a pretty big deal as a feature

Isn't there already a social network for meeting new people, http://www.tagged.com/

Plus there was anybeat.com - which got shut down http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/09/anonymous-social-network-an...

I came here to say the same thing, I've been actively reducing my time on FB the last year. Now I will be increasing it further.

>Then again, that could just increase the amount of noise on Facebook and drive people away even faster.

How is this any different to just creating an event normally ?

First to replicate OKCupid's compatibility algorithm and automatically do it for Facebook profiles, throw it into a SoLoMo app, then charge $20 to hang out -- what the kids are calling it these days -- your top 5 compatible people and boom! You got a hit. Then watch it get copied.

But it's okay, you'll get the last laugh in another few decades when having a Facebook profile is more powerful than having government issued identification and we're in a topsy turvy world where if the Facebook personality emitting/detecting jewel you have to wear around your neck would light up if someone else compatible is close by for you to mate with.

At least you didn't contribute that to society.

I like this idea http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/01/16/bing-fund-adds-ma...

What you describe sounds eerily like the äppärät from Super Sad True Love Story.

Quick, someone grab facebookjewels.com

sounds just like letsdateapp.com

I consider the "meet new people" a downgrade for facebook than an upgrade. I hope that is not a direction they pursue aggressively because it risks making facebook less relevant. One of the things that made facebook different is the expectation that you're somewhat creepy if you just go around friending random people. As a long time facebook user, I prefer it stay that way.

Just to play devil's advocate... creepiness is defined by the generation _after_ you. It's inherently defined, something creeps along, up, or around. So, really, what you think actually doesn't matter. It's what the 16 yo kids think is cool. And if they enjoy spending all afternoon after school going through Facebook profiles, well I guess so it goes.

creepiness is defined by the generation _after_ you

Source:)?

I get the "hook" to lure people onto facebook may change from generation to generation but I wouldn't necessarily say the hook for a newer generation supersedes the needs of the existing generations. If that were the case, facebook would always be focued on building a product for 16-18 year olds. Clearly that hasn't been the case from their past history.

Right now search for people that aren't in your friends-of-friends network is generally broken. When I try to find someone by name/school, name/city etc it returns that no-one exists. I suspect it's some kind of sharding issue and FB search right now isn't global.

To that extent, this is a pretty big thing for them to pull off. I could certainly see it helping their growth if you are finally able to search for people in a more fine-grained way and connect with them.

Some say this may be unwanted -- that's exactly why FB has been testing having people pay to send messages. They know this will be a problem and are searching for solutions.

That's where other social networks differ. On Diaspora for example one probably doesn't know anyone after joining, and you always meet new people. You follow interests, subjects and conversations, not your acquaintances from real life. So it may be "big" for Facebook, but it's routine for other networks.

It might be a routine for others but the big thing here is that facebook found a way to do it and there are a LOT of people already on facebook. That will then make facebook the biggest and most efficient site for this feature.

Hashtags work for that quite successfully (in Twitter and Diaspora). I'm not sure how well will these graphs work in comparison, but it's better than nothing for Facebook.

I have to say when I saw that part I immediately checked my privacy settings.

i seriously don't get it.

myself and around me, people (early 30ies now) all use FB primarily to "stay in touch" with people that are not really close anymore. old colleagues from school, uni, whatever. co-workers? not so much, for that you have linkedin.

so:

1., who exactly should i want to meet out of these people's connections?

2., as no one is using the like button, what exactly is it supposed to data mine?

3., why would i go to FB to search, if my browser automatically searches in google if i start typing in the URL bar? or the search box on iOS.

social search? i want to know which restaurants are recommended by people with taste, not my friends. movie recommendations? i prefer ebert over the people i know.

crowdsourcing is mob rule.

I agree, I can't even keep up with the handful of friends I've known in real life, for decades. Like I really want to make faux friends at web scale.

That said, fb has never made sense to me except through the lens of millennial and boomer narcissism. Maybe they'll lap it up. (I am not intentionally exempting our generation but I've never quite gotten the same vibe as from those who came before and after us.)

No one is using the like button?

I assume you mean "No one is clicking the like button", but of course they are, and even when you don't click the like button Facebook still knows exactly which page you saw it on, and that gives them plenty of information to mine..

Let's see... new search: "Find [single] [females] with [poor self-esteem]". Jackpot!

Dating Schmating.

What a myopic view. Lets take myself, and 90% of the people I know - as real friends. They are all in relationships.

You know what could be "Huge" - creating ad-hoc groups around interests.

Imagine searching for people around you, within a definable degree of separation, that have the same interests where you can do activities.

Meeting people yes - dating does NOT have to be the singular vector for such relationships, that will be a natural secondary. And as a secondary - remains less creepy.

> "and meet new people, too."

This really seems to harken back to facebook circa 2004. Every single comma separated phrase in interests section of your profile was a link that brought up all the other profiles with that phrase in your college network. I suppose some folks discovered each other this way, but it didn't seem very popular. No one cared when facebook disabled it.

Not to mention the ability to run checkbox-based searches across your university network based on a combination of gender "interested in" and "relationship status". Not sure it was lack of use that got that removed...

Completely agree on that. That's actually the very first Facebook feature that got me excited and that might make me go back to Facebook.

This is also the obvious next step for social networks and one that quite a few startups (including ourselves) have been working on for the past couple of years under the "people discovery" banner. Can't wait to see this in action.

So far you can only search entities related to the friends of your friends. A journalist who was at the FB live event said.

For most people, friends of friends is a very large, semi-curated group of people.

The Facebook default sharing (just some timr ago, or still) is that share to your friends of friends. Or at least you could see the images of friends of friends.

Personally, I hope Facebook owns the online dating space in a decade.

It's time for online dating to die. I've had enough of my little sister calling me up with horror stories, like the time a guy's first message was "what's the largest you've taken." No joke.

A world where online dating takes place on Facebook (or Ark) will be a better place.

> Meet in real life -> Add on facebook.

This is facebook's core value prop though. To flip is would be fundamentally flip what facebook's good at - creating a deeper digital connection with ppl you meet in real life.

Meeting ppl on facebook became weird and creepy when they became too open. It wasn't an issue so much when they were closed to college networks. They sacrificed privacy for growth.

On the flipside, consider LinkedIn, where it's not considered creepy to reach out to a complete stranger (recruiters do it all the time). But b/c LinkedIn has a focus (careers) and has more privacy, this is acceptable in their ecosystem.

Net net, I think the only way facebook can be about meeting new ppl and do it well is if they sacrifice openness. Otherwise the creepy factor will undermine success.

Great observation. When I clicked "Try a search" it pulled up people I am friends with who live in my city, but as I scrolled down I saw people I am not friends with included as well. Seems like the next logical step.

Uh. Hi. Facebook seems to think we should date. Wanna go out sometime?

There's a huge problem with this.

For many people, it's creepy to "search out" and find you. Making an initial contact on the internet is a far bigger hurdle in a tight social network like facebook than it is in real life.

For myself, Facebook Groups have actually already done a great deal to put me in a setting with a bunch of new people that I can relate to... and I have made friends that way. From group projects, to school groups, to interest groups. You get to know each other surprisingly well.

Search requires initiative. Initiative is very uncool.

>It seems they're explicitly avoiding the "dating" route

Actually one of the examples shown today was a dating example, one of the Facebook managers who oversaw the product trying to set his wife's cousin up with someone: "friends of people I'm friends with who live in San Francisco and are from India"

http://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+%22graph+search%22+%...

Many users have already been adding random people for the social games that have been going for a few years now. Like Farmville or Sorority Life. I know several people who ended up talking to some of those random "game friends" and ended up befriending them in real life. Granted, it hasn't been incredibly common or straight-forward.

Facebook is the place where I share personal things freely because I know its only my family and close friends. I don't let other people get in, and use LinkedIn or Twitter instead. Adding someone on facebook without knowing who the person really is? At least I am not sold.

Isn't this just meetup.com but with the bonus of more "personalised" content tailored to your facebook profile?

I'm trying to work out if this is a good idea or not. Do privacy settings still apply when you join a group?

Right, because meetup.com has a higher market cap than Google. Oh wait. Online dating is not the big thing when compared to online search.

Agree and w/o doubt FB will beyond just friend of a friend - e.g. not too long before they expose three or four degrees of separation?

So the only question is, how would you interact with those newly found people?

Would people just message any stranger? I guess thats not the norm now.

> Would people just message any stranger?

If they want to, doesn't it cost $1 now? Maybe that's the whole idea...

"Siri, set me up on a Facebook Blind Date."

Though I don't trust Facebook.

Sorry but mimicking meetup.com is not a big thing. Very few people like to meet up with strangers regardless of similarities in hobbies/activities. This will cater to a niche crowd and that will be it. This is a great feature on Facebook but let's temper the excitement about its importance.