With all the bitching and moaning about the changes to the Facebook privacy policy we have to ask ourselves why are they now changing as they have always been one of the most private social medial websites for people to network and meet up.
We believe that it ultimately has to do with search engines now wanting to incorporate content from social media websites into their results. recently we have heard news of Twitter doing a deal with the business networking website “Linked In” to allow that website to bring in its content.
All the Major websites are doing it, MSN live chat now allows you to bring in your MySpace information into your account there. The use of a login system called Open ID allows you to have one account from facebook for example and that can be used on loads of other sites, making it easier to integrate larger and larger sites together.
Facebook is estimated to have nearly 1,000,000 users in Ireland by Christmas 2009, so now they have 1/4 of the population, they also have what all hungry search engines need. . . Content. We talked about content for web last week and how it will be needed more and more in the coming years.
Google Live Search
This is a new feature of Google’s algorithm that basically reads social media websites such as Twitter and uses its content as the results for questions searched for. So this is a big step away from google showing your websites it read through last night and showing you the “latest news”. Well if its from last night then its not the “latest” but if its from Twitter or F it is the latest. Facebook and Twitter are no strapped to a computer desk any more, we carry them around with us, they are now part of most mobile phones with all of us feeding them each time we click on a letter.
Doing a search today, google replied with a live twitter feed as the first results and then the normal listing from websites it would have indexed the day before. This is Google specifically pushing the social media websites as they have the “latest” content and this is why they need to read our content on Facebook!
For more information on how the interweb is changing call 053 9430748 to make an appointment.
