In case you haven’t heard Facebook is allowing user profiles to be indexed and listed in public search engines. A lot of eyebrows have raised, hairy, unkempt eyebrows, at the prospect of this. They are however giving all of their users a one month period to set their profiles to private if they so wish. it seems Facebook is trying to become the official online White Pages. This idea is innocent enough but what do you think is motivating them to do this? Some would say they are trying to improve their SEO rankings, others propose that they are trying to reach a broader audience.

By searching or “googling” a friends name their Facebook listing may come up. The user who searched for them may not have a Facebook account and decide to sign up to get the rest of the info. Once again this raises the issue of privacy, even users who set their profiles to private will still be listed but with substantially less information than users that don’t. Is it a good move to risk alienating long time users to gain a few more? Only time will tell but it will be interesting to watch.

Also, Martha Stewart has launched a Facebook profile, you can see it here. So for anyone who has ever wanted to poke her, here is your chance. I wonder if hers will be set to private? 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 1:13 pm and is filed under internet marketing, fringe marketing, Entertainment, social media optimization, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.