Facebook gets Twitter-like search; buys FriendFeed

New users to Facebook (and probably some existing users, but not all of them yet) are getting a new search experience in Facebook next week. The new interface for search makes it possible to see all public results from Facebook users (the Everyone filter), or just results from your friends. Or, as before, only Events, Groups or Applications.

The Everyone filter is the key new feature. It lets Facebook users monitor the entire network for news and updates on big topics, the same way Twitter was consumed for information coming from Iran after the recent election.

You get updated with a little alert when a search result using the Everyone filter gets new results. (Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Like Twitter Search, the Facebook search result page alerts you when new results come in that match your query, but it doesn't update the whole page until you ask. This is arguably the best way to keep people up-to-date without overwhelming them.

Facebook's 250 million-strong user base, and the demographic breadth of its audience, puts Twitter's geeky but growing audience to shame. However, Twitter and Facebook are not, strictly speaking, direct competitors. The standard social models for the sites are still quite different. In Twitter, by default, anyone can follow anyone else. In Facebook, however, people are accustomed to only reading updates from those people with whom they have established a two-way relationship. The new Everyone filter makes Facebook like Twitter in search, but it will take some time for people to learn to use Facebook the way they do Twitter, and it's not clear that the two models will mesh well on one social platform.

See Facebook's official blog post for more on the new features.

In related news, Facebook also announced yesterday that it is buying a web service called FriendFeed that gives users a view of what their friends are doing on all sorts of social media sites, including Facebook's rivals.

In an interview, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said the two services would eventually merge, though FriendFeed will operate separately for now. He said FriendFeed was drawn to Facebook's much larger base of 250 million users.

"Facebook has a really unique opportunity for our team to reach a significant percentage of the world, and that was an opportunity I think everyone on our team was extremely excited about," he said.

Facebook said all 12 employees of Mountain View, California-based FriendFeed will work for Facebook, whose headquarters is nearby in Palo Alto. FriendFeed's four founders — Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh — will take on senior positions on the engineering and product teams at Facebook.

It's unclear what exactly Facebook plans to do with FriendFeed, which centres on the idea of instantaneously aggregating information from online destinations like short-messaging site Twitter, review site Yelp and photo-sharing site Flickr.

Gartner analyst Ray Valdes said the FriendFeed acquisition should help Facebook open up its site and boost features that show users more information in real time.

"They needed to do something to meet the Twitter challenge," he said, referring to the messaging site that has shown the type of buzz Facebook once enjoyed.

Chris Cox, Facebook's vice-president of products, said the companies had been talking about a combination for some time, because they were both working on solving the same problems — how to help people connect with one another over time, how to make these connections work on various devices and how to filter information through friends.

"I think both companies start with the premise that the most valuable information in the world is the one that comes from the people you care about," he said. "Building technologies that leverage those relationships everywhere you go is where we're both starting from."