Facebook’s on a roll today. Earlier today, Facebook acquired FriendFeed, one of the largest and most-discussed social media acquisitions we’ve seen in a long time. The deal is partly seen as a move by the world’s largest social network to boost their social technology, specifically realtime streams, conversations, social media aggregation, and search.
That’s what makes Facebook’s latest move so intriguing. In June, Facebook announced it was building a new real-time search to rival Twitter Search. It not only would search status updates, but photos, notes, images, videos, and links. Facebook has also made changes that will allow users to post their status updates publicly in anticipation of the new search.
Fast forward to today: Facebook just announced that it is rolling out the new Facebook search. With realtime search and FriendFeed (
) in its pocket, Facebook is gunning directly for Twitter (
).
According to Facebook, the new search will crawl the last 30 days of news feed activity – specifically status updates, photos, links, videos and notes from your friends’ Facebook profiles and the pages of which you are a fan. It will also crawl any public profiles and status updates (like mine).
The Biggest Challenge to Twitter Yet
As we have stated in previous articles, these moves are designed to compete with Twitter. The company does not like the fact that millions of people turn to Twitter when there is breaking news or a major event. Advanced Facebook search is a major leap towards that fight.
Will the FriendFeed acquisition play a role in the new search? We think so. FriendFeed rolled out real-time search itself not long ago, and it is very powerful. While Facebook’s done a good job with its new search features, FriendFeed can make it better. FriendFeed also generates more conversation, something Facebook aspires to have on its website as well.
Finally, this new search may not just be about Twitter, but also Google (), who is developing a real-time search engine of their own. If Facebook can get a bigger foothold in this lucrative market, even Google could be affected.
Today’s becoming one of the most interesting and dynamic days in social media history. Facebook ()’s on a roll.
