Vladimir Rakhmanin | Deputy Online Editor
Facebook are in the process of rolling out a new major design overhaul to its wildly successful social networking service. In order to tweak it before making it go public, the company decided to create a beta version, in order to test it on a select number of users. A couple of days ago, I decided to sign myself up on the waiting list, in order to see what the future would hold – this waiting list can be found at the following link – https://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch. Thankfully, the wait didn’t last that long, and I was able to get some hands on with Facebook’s most important update since Timeline.
Thankfully, unlike Timeline, Graph Search doesn’t really change the user layout all that much. The first thing you will notice is that the ‘Friend Request’, ‘Messages’ and ‘Notifications’ buttons have been moved to the very right of the screen, where the ‘Log Out’ option used to be. This will take some time getting used to, after instinctively moving your cursor to the left of the screen for the past four years, but it’s nothing major. You will also notice that the three buttons have a more of an ‘indented’ look, making them a tad more aesthetically pleasing.
The main change is the titular ‘Graph Search’ feature, which Facebook is calling one of the fundamental pillars of the company. This is basically a revamped search bar, which now sits towards the right of the screen, instead of the middle (as it used to). It’s also a lot larger than its previous iteration, probably to emphasise its importance.
Only after taking the tutorial, which is provided when you log on for the first time, did I realise the sheer power of this new tool. Whereas previously you could only search separately for pages, friends and groups, now you can search for them together. Let me explain – say you wanted to find out which of your friends like Coldplay (so you could promptly unfriend them). All you have to do is type ‘My friends that like Coldplay’ in the new search bar, and boom. You will get a list of all your friends that have liked the page. No need to actually go to the page, it will all be there in the list that Graph Search provides you with.
Or say you wanted to find all the photos which featured two of your friends in the same picture. Same thing – you type ‘Photos of Ken Adams and Regina Filange’, and you’re sorted. All of those photos that you requested will be there. Perhaps even more controversially, photos that you have hidden from your Timeline but not deleted will also appear, whether you like it or not. So next time your friend take a snapshot of you in a compromising position, hiding it will no longer be enough – you will have to actually tell them to take it down.
Now, this alone is harmless enough – the real fun starts when you start searching for people who you’re not friends with but who have not made their profile fully private. In fact, a tumblr account has been set up for some of the funny ones. For instance, you can search for ‘mothers of Catholics who live in Italy and like Durex’. Or ‘mothers of Jews who like bacon’. Or ‘current employers of people who like racism’, which produces a list that includes McDonalds, Target, and the United States Air Force. Now, I’ve spoken before about the lack of privacy in today’s world, but this quite the warning to think twice before you like that ‘Big Titties’ page on Facebook.
It’s not altogether clear how much of an invasion of privacy Graph Search is yet – what I will say, however, is that it is an extremely powerful tool, that will at least make our Facebook lives a tad more convenient.
