Facebook's Database of Intentions

With the full introduction of Graph Search this week, Facebook has taken a significant step forward in harnessing its own database of intentions-- in this case social intentions. The tool was unveiled alongside a broad redesign of Facebook's user interface and the changes are very exciting.

Graph Search enables users to form complicated queries in plain English and find subsets of users or other objects that match their criteria. This is incredibly powerful-- Facebook will know who you are looking for, when and where. Existing marketing research already tells us how much more powerful personal recommendations are as compared to generic (even keyword-targeted ads). Imagine how valuable this channel will be to marketers once Facebook can sell combinations of ads with curated personal endorsements from your network based on what you are searching for. 

Case in point: the query "Show me which of my friends from New York have bought clothes lately" may result in a long group of posts from your friends. Imagine if Retailer X could ensure that if any of your friends had purchased from them, their post would be on top of your feed. This is marriage of AdWords-style targeting with social media could be a game changer.

Finally, Facebook has unveiled an API alongside Graph Search. The API will allow anybody to search among Facebook's public content. This could be remarkably powerful in letting us all search Facebook's database of intentions to understand what people are doing. While Google has long made a number of analytical tools available, they have always made it laborious and declined to provide an API, ensuring that outsiders cannot leverage their data in a serious and scalable way. Another big move for Facebook.