Facebook baut heimlich, still und leise die Suche aus

Facebook hat heimlich, still und leise begonnen, seine Suche umzubauen und von einer reinen Personensuche zu einer Suche überzugehen, die auch, zum Beispiel, für das Auffinden lokaler Geschäfte genutzt werden kann.

Hervorragend beschrieben wird das in einem Text von Blake Ross (ehemals Director of Product bei Facebook und Mitgründer von Firefox) auf Medium: „How to Swallow $200 Million Accidentally„:

1. Judge a company’s priorities by its pixels. This is an announcement that sits at the very top of a feature that sits at the very top of Facebook.
2. It follows a year of intense, smart, and creative experimentation in this area. This isn’t a lark. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve been noticing more and more public content/search/trend features popping up all over Facebook this year. A little indicator here, a little bar there. Some helpful suggestions. Not much to look at on their own, but together they add up to a coherent product experience that is deeply integrated into the core.

And most importantly:

3. Facebook is now ranking content above people.

Produkte wie dieses werden nicht mit viel Fanfare verkündet, sondern öffentlich aber nur sichtbar für Leute, die wissen, wonach sie schauen müssen, iterativ vorangetrieben:

Because anyone who builds products at scale already knows the secret: Professional assassins don’t introduce themselves. Whatever the popular myth, Foo doesn’t crush Bar merely by relaunching it to grander fanfare; it tinkers quietly for years, experimenting with novel and native ways to do things that steal from Bar a visit here, a visit there. One day, a data scientist at Bar is grabbing coffee when she notices a trivial — almost imperceptible — dip in a graph that for as long as anyone can remember has gone up and to the right.

Facebook is probably going to kill Yelp. It’s probably not going to do it with a website called Welp. But when W goes from Will to Walmart after a decade, sleep with one eye open. That’s how you get iced.

Der Text ist nebenbei die mit Abstand beste Beschreibung seit langem, wie man (Software-)Produkte von außen beurteilt.