Facebook Vies To Become Your Homepage – And Why That’s A Big Deal | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Vies To Become Your Homepage – And Why That’s A Big Deal

techcrunch.com

14 pointsBvS25 comments

When you can tap your entire social graph for answers to your queries, sites like Facebook have the ability to push aside search engines like Google as the first site that springs to mind when people think about surfing the WWW to find information, connect to other people, communicate with friends, and so on.

Am I somehow connecting to the wrong Facebook or something? Because whenever I log in all I get is dull status updates from people I somewhat know.

The problem is you are relying on TechCrunch for tech punditry.

Techcrunch is one of those tech blogs that has very little knowledge about technology.

Can you name some "tech pundits" that actually do have "knowledge" or at least make useful and accurate predictions?

Seems to me like it's the kind of field where if you were good at it, you'd be doing something else with those skills...

Yes sure.

Arstechnica, Engadget. Hell, even gizmodo does a better job.

Have you never heard of tech journalist with tech backgrounds? Or finance journalist with economics background?

I don't think a single TC bloggers have any tech background and they continue to spew out rubbish day in and day out.

I think it's more they feel the need to constantly be searching and suggesting what the next big thing could be rather than evaluating things on their merits.

I understand why Facebook is useful and fun for many, I don’t understand how it could replace a search engine. Facebook can certainly shoulder some traditional search engine tasks – looking for people, say, or asking questions you know your friends can answer – but that is far from the majority of things I use a search engine for.

Just looking at my search history, how can Facebook tell me how many calories 100g pasta with tomato sauce have? How can Facebook tell me how VAT and inflation are connected? Does Facebook know what a clathrate compound is? Is Facebook supposed to know when Civ 5 for the Mac is coming out?

It's definitely not going to replace a search engine when I'm told that I'm posting and commenting on too much stuff I find on the internet (wide variety, but some of it could answer someone's question like the ones you've suggested) and that my feed is clogging up people's screens. People, at least my connections, are not interested in using facebook for anything other than status updates.

It's very possible that Facebook could integrate with Bing.

Bing is a search engine.

– edit: Just for kicks I only now tried all searches I mentioned above and it seems to me like Facebook is already integrating with Bing in some way. I searched for “100g pasta calories” and three Bing results showed up.

That is neat. I guess they don't want to promote this feature too much while it is in their best interests to keep everyone on Facebook.

It'd be interesting to see what impact this would have on Bings market share if this feature was made obvious and promoted.

Facebook already integrates with Bing. And Microsoft is a substantial shareholder in Facebook.

At the risk of stating the obvious the Facebook you login into is entirely different than everyone else. It really depends on who your friends are. It probably also depends on how much satisfaction you get out of being a voyeur. That's a big part of FB's success.

For many people, the status updates from people they know are what they care about, and all those little factoids on the web are pretty much irrelevant.

If I remember my high school/college days correctly, most people care far more about their social relationships than technology or knowledge.

"But for many people, social networking sites are slowly taking over at least part of the role of search engines, which is mainly to retrieve information."

Don't agree, they are rather take part of the role of tv.

I'd tend to say more phone calls, SMS and to some extent instant messaging. You could say Twitter, being a broadcast medium has taken over TV more, but it compliments it more than anything.

Facebook is Microsoft's trojan horse to win two wars: search and mobile. Microsoft is a major investor in Facebook and thus far has been losing both search and mobile to Google.

With Facebook as the home page, Microsoft becomes the de facto search engine for millions of people because Bing is already integrated into Facebook.

Also, with more people communicating via Facebook mobile, Microsoft slowly but surely inches its way to winning the war on mobile through integration with Facebook on mobile devices.

I don't use a homepage at all, when I launch my browser it takes me to a blank page and I request what I want directly. I really don't like to be distracted by a default home page.

Facebook as stated they are not making a phone, but they didnt say they were not making a phone OS like Android. Im thinking a Facebook mobile OS makes sense. THose you want to talk(voice, text, IM, pics, etc) with are on your facebook now and they just released their new social inbox. This is all speculative but just maybe they'll do this?

I can see this happening. A phone marketed as having Facebook OS will appeal to a huge market.

I think though we are moving away from the homepage though, I prefer how chrome displays the 8 most visited pages upon opening.

I doubt my parents or sister would know how to change their homepage manually. These are the people that Facebook are targeting this feature at. Not tech nerds.

I don't really buy this kind of thing, not these days, sure there will be some percentage of people who are new to computers but in general I don't think so.

Pretty much every program on windows/osx you ever interact with has an options display accessible from the top menus and pretty much all of them have the ability to change the homepage.

Now I would agree that a popup like this give people motivation to change, perhaps that haven't considered it before, but I doubt many that have been using computers for some time would have trouble changing there homepage if motivated to do so.

My computer's browser opens to 3 tabs that pertain to my work and interests.

My home computer, where my wife and kids use it all the time defaults to Yahoo.

Different worlds.

I can already ask my friends if I want information that they may have. More over, there are at least a dozen ways I can do so in a medium that's not littered with daily horoscopes, stupid quizzes, Farm Mafia Mob Zombie Fish Wars, and photos of pets from people I barely knew in high school. Search engines are for things my friends don't know, or for those times when I don't want to bother those friends, because I know they're busy with more important things to do than sit on Facebook all day long.

I haven't used a homepage since browsers implemented the save tabs feature.

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