I noticed a few days ago that Facebook search was no longer returning anything from their own service, only the web. In other words, if you search for something in the search field, you’ll get a bunch of items out on the web that match your terms but no facebook pages. I’ve found a bunch of other folks have noticed the problem, but there hasn’t been any official word from Facebook about a problem as far as I can dig up.

I tested in FF and IE, and interestingly actually got a return when I clicked on “Pages” in IE *once* for some things, but couldn’t make it work again.

OK so what Facebook DIDNT tell you about thir new privacy settings thing is that they have made a deal to sell all the information you have marked as public to the Google and Microsoft Bing search engines. That’s right! Unless you’re careful, everything you have ever posted on Facebook may soon get indexed. When users are first presented with the privacy settings page, the default is to share almost everything – meaning that if you aren’t careful all the crap you thought was private will instead be available instantly to get indexed by a search engine. Folks are already in an uproar about the new settings, but Facebook is a business and plans to make big bucks off of your content, and you can bet that Google and Microsoft aren’t willing to pony up big cash for altruistic reasons either. Facebook kindly reminds you that you can change the privacy settings later, but of course, by then it will already be indexed.
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As a newcomer to Facebook, I thought it would be interesting to jot down some of my initial thoughts after I’ve been using the service for just a few days, and then perhaps revisit it sometime in the future after I’ve used it a bit more. The first thing I should note is that I’m not a big fan of these “gated communities” on the web. The web was created as an open and free platform, yet as sites like Facebook and Myspace busily build out ever more compelling social networking sites, I worry about an erosion of that openness and freedom. It’s almost as if they took lessons from AOL in how to capture new users and keep them locked into a proprietary and limiting window on the web.
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