Facebook pushed out a new change this morning that I think will be somewhat interesting to see the effects of. Your Facebook profile will now show up on Google and other search engine’s results. While it won’t have your full profile indexed (sorry, doing a search for “drunk skydiving” won’t pull up your profile), anyone who does a search for your name will soon be able to see a landing page with your picture. It has links (which require registering first), all of which are configurable on your privacy page.
Facebook has always been described as a closed garden, in that your profile only exists within Facebook, and is not visible to anyone outside, like MySpace allows. Is this a step closer to opening itself up? In any case, it will be interesting to see how this alters search engine rankings. If you were to do a search for anyone’s name, will their Facebook profile show up first? That will significantly change how people “discover” information on others.
At the same time, Facebook also allows you to search for people even if you are not a member/logged in. You can go to the front page and take a look.
