Have a Facebook Account? Read This!

Think social networking, and you are thinking of Facebook. Everyone you meet on the street, the guy who sat next to you in the morning crowded bus, the little kid who lives across the street and goes to school in the morning, everyone, has an account on Facebook. The social networking giant has rolled out its latest trend setting feature, the Graph Search.

The new Facebook Graph Search has all the potential to embarrass you, surprise you and even shock you. With this new feature that CEO Mark Zuckerberg so proudly calls the third pillar of the Facebook ecosystem; users can get more organized and detailed information on anything they might fancy searching for.

Take a situation where you are moving to a new city, say Cochin. Before you shift base, you want to know if any of your friends are there in Cochin. Search for Friends in Cochin, and voila, there you have a list of all your friends who are in Cochin. Graph search can also give you stratified information and history of your friendship with someone on Facebook. A search for My Friends yields an exhaustive list of your friends, replete with information like their current city, when you became friends with them, the number of mutual friends you have, their employer, where they studied and the places they stayed at, all that and more!

Facebook has access to hoards of your information, some if it, you didn’t even know existed.  It can create various embarrassing situations for you as even a person who is not in your network too can access your data depending on the privacy settings you have enabled for your account and for your posts.

According to its Data Use Policy, Facebook will save the queries a user makes, and you can review what all you have searched for in the Activity Log. These search queries claim to not pop up on your timeline or elsewhere, but exist to remind you what you have been searching for. The worst part is that you cannot opt out of this service. For now, the Graph Search is still in beta, so you have a little time before the world will be able to look for your content.

Now would be a wise time to go online and review what all information on you is available online and make the necessary changes, tweak the privacy settings if required, untag and remove embarrassing photographs of yours, cancel memberships to groups that have the potential to embarrass you, in short, clean up your image, before it gets too late. Wondering where to find all the information you need to review? It here that the tiny tab, the Activity Log attains importance. It is shows all the things you have done on any particular day, allowing you the flexibility to delete it or change the privacy settings. It neatly shows what you have posted, what you have liked and what photos you are tagged in. See anything you like? Delete/modify it from here.

Zuckerberg said that the engineers want to add a lot of features to add to this in its next release, which includes indexing more data on Facebook. Maybe it means, one day we will be able to search people’s statuses based on their content.