Years ago Facebook made a wildly successful data grab by putting About details at the top of the profile. Now with its Timeline redesign‘s “Suggested” sections, Facebook could fill out Graph Search by making it easy to select and show off where you’ve been, what you Like, and what you’ve watched, read, and listened to. And Facebook does more with that data than you might expect.
The year was 2010 and Facebook was in the dark. Hundreds of millions of people had profiles but didn’t fill out their About section with their hometown, current city, relationship status, current employer, education history, or spoken languages. These characteristics help define people’s identities. The data could also be used to personalize content feeds and target ads, if Facebook could just get us to volunteer it.
So Facebook redesigned the profile in December 2010 to start displaying this info front and center. If you didn’t fill it out, you were greeted with incomplete prompts every time you visited your profile. And if the info was out of date, friends would probably remind you that you lived in a different city than you said. Over just a few days, huge swaths of Facebook’s users keyed in this crucial information. It’s secretly one of Facebook’s most successful moves ever. It simultaneously helped people express themselves and see better content, while turning Facebook into one of the world’s most accurate ad targeters.
Today, Facebook is going after another critical data set — what you’ve done. The biggest problem with Graph Search, its new internal search feature, may be that Facebook’s information on what we care about is stale and shallow. Many people haven’t accurately mapped their real-world interests to Facebook Likes. Those who have probably haven’t kept that map current by pruning things they’ve fallen out of love with and adding their recent finds. If you Graph Search for “Music my friends Like,” you may be getting a better impression of their tastes from a few years ago.
Last year Facebook’s Open Graph platform added a new dimension to interest sharing. It let you actually consume media on third-party apps that would share that data back to Facebook. Data about what you listened to on Spotify, watched on Netflix, and read on Goodreads started flowing in. But Facebook was missing both what you had already consumed before Open Graph launched, and what you wanted to experience in the future.
Facebook’s redesigned About page and its new “Suggested” sections let you enter this info with one click. When you scroll down your About page, in each of the Music, Movies, TV Shows, and Books sections there’s a set of suggestions that let you instantly say you have listened to/watched/read something or want to. The suggestions are personalized based on what else you’ve Liked and consumed, plus your identity and social graph: Where And What You Like
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