Facebook profiles will appear in Google results next month

Posted September 6, 2007 at 11:08 PM by Chris Marshall

Section: Tech News, Web, Websites

At first I read this as bad news, that would probably cause quite a stir in the on-line community. Then I forgot all about it, and then I had a bit of a re think. Generalizations are dangerous, they should be avoided, they open you up to people intent on proving the exception, so here goes with my generalization:

Facebook users will basically fall into two camps, those that use Facebook to keep in touch in a private way with a close circle of “friends” and those that are chasing the modern day disease of “internet celebrity” who are intent on sharing their most private (and inane) details with the whole world.

On that basis the first group aren’t going to bother about this at all as they will have their settings set to private already, and for those chasing fame they are going to love this surely?

This is what Facebook have to say:

The Public Search Listing of a profile shows the profile picture thumbnail and links to interact with a user on Facebook. People will always have to log in or register to poke, message or add someone as a friend. A user can also restrict what information shows in their public listing by going to the search privacy page. For instance, if a user does not want their profile picture to be shown, they can uncheck that box under “What people can do with my search results”.

Just an attempt to drive more traffic fron name-based searches would be the cynical view!

Via [Mashable]