subject: The Useful New Facebook Recommendations Feature [print this page] Facebook is quite accomplished at providing recommendations to each of its members for new things that might interest them. It's News Feed service tries to profile each member for the kind of interests and activities they or their friends have been partial to in the past, and tries to filter its Live Feed for possible new items to interest them with. With all the work it puts into making intelligent guesses about things to recommend you, Facebook is obviously the one place on earth with the most in-depth insight into each person - probably even more so than Google. Facebook is the one website that has any chance of standing shoulder to shoulder with Google; and its recommendations service could one day be even more popular than Google's search. Facebook appears now to be in preparation mode for the release of an all-new Recommendations engine. And it seems the most likely to cement Facebook domination.
Why should Recommendations be bigger than search though? Here's the thing: recommendations get a person to like something even before she gets to the part where she thinks to search on the Internet for it. It heads search technology off at the pass, in some ways making it redundant. Facebook's Recommendations could take the form of something like the Sidebar that comes with the Google toolbar that gives you a nonstop commentary on the page you visit. It's called Google SideWiki and its potential in allowing people to access public opinion about a website without the interference of the Webmasters is rett great (even if it hasn't really found much popularity).
Details have been somewhat sparse on Facebook's Recommendations feature; but investigative work by websites around the Internet suspect that the Recommendations function will obtain its input from Friend Connections on Facebook. If you happen to be visiting a website that your Facebook friends have had anything to say about, you will find suggestions from Facebook that you might possibly enjoy specific pages on the website that your friends have recommended. Of course, this will start a whole new debate about privacy, and whether this feature should be turned on by default; but this is all a part of what it takes for a social networking company to send its roots deep into its user base. But to most people, the immediate rewards of having great recommendations from friends made for everything that interests them should more than make up for any sticky privacy issues.
