Facebook Profiles to be Found on Goodle, Yahoo, MSN, and the others…..

Straight from the Facebook Blog:

“Starting today, we are making limited public search listings available to people who are not logged in to Facebook. We're expanding search so that people can see which of their friends are on Facebook more easily. The public search listing contains less information than someone could find right after signing up anyway, so we're not exposing any new information, and you have complete control over your public search listing.

Above is an example of how a public search listing appears. It contains your name and current profile picture thumbnail. If you do not want this listing to appear, you can change your Search Privacy settings.

In a few weeks, we will allow these Public Search listings (depending on users' individual privacy settings) to be found by search engines like Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc. We think this will help more people connect and find value from Facebook without exposing any actual profile information or data.”

Here at Rollett Marketing, we are very excited for this to roll out. Facebook is now embarking on a great strategy that Myspace currently held hostage. When all is said and done these profiles will start popping up at the top of search engines for namesake of the profile. This puts you out in the open to be found, which if using Facebook for Marketing, can be a great added bonus.

I am seeing some fuss from Facebook members, but you can already do a search by name on Facebook if you are not a member, this just lets Google or whatever search engine do the searching for you. Facebook is taking the right step in making only the name and picture available to the public and also allowing you to block this all together.

In the long run this could increase Facebook memberships, with the increase in the visibility of who is on Facebook available to the searching public. If you search on Google for a long lost relative and their Facebook profile shows up, you may be inclined to join the network as well. Great strategy all around for Mark and the boys in the Valley.

I’m sure this will be covered by everyone and their mom, so I’ll let some time settle and come back to this subject when the search goes live to the search engines in about a month. Myspace get on your game, or this could be more of the beginning of the end for the former king of Social Networking land (Even though I’m still not sure whether companies will get great market ability with just a Facebook profile vs. a Myspace profile. More on this to come later).

Check these related articles:
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Mashable.com
Search Engine Journal

-G-Ro