Tweaking your Activity Log just became a necessary and tedious new part of being a Facebook user. Thanks to the service’s new Graph Search feature, all that profile info you’ve painstakingly updated over the years (employer, home town, relationship status, movie likes, etc) and all the photos you’ve added over time, are now to become data in a database of the social network’s trillion connections between a billion users. Before Facebook rolls out this new search engine to the masses, it is rolling it out in a very limited beta to select users. And while those guinea pigs test it out, the rest of us will have the chance to tweak a few things to ensure that our dirty laundry isn’t so easily accessible. Granted, all this data has been available to our friends forever. We put it out there for them to see. All Facebook is doing is indexing that info for our friends, and friends of friends.
About Shelly Palmer
Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named LinkedIn’s “Top Voice in Technology,” he covers tech and business for Good Day New York, is a regular commentator on CNN and writes a popular daily business blog. He's a bestselling author, and the creator of the popular, free online course, Generative AI for Execs. Follow @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com.