Nerd fight!

Blake Ross

A weekend coding effort, led by Facebook rabble-rouser Blake Ross, gave birth to a browser bookmarklet called “don’t be evil” that rewrites Google’s personalized search results to include content from other social networks. (Ross’s official title is Director of Product, and he was previously a co-founder of Firefox.)

Ross said engineers from Twitter and Myspace also helped out with the bookmarklet, but he didn’t name them. The group launched a Web site today, at focusontheuser.org.

This gets slightly complicated, but you can install the bookmarklet yourself in Chrome, Firefox and Safari, or watch a video about how it works. After you do a normal Google search with personalized results turned on, you can click on the bookmarklet to get an updated version of the results that includes links to Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, CrunchBase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, GitHub and Google+.

I ran into a bunch of hiccups when I tried the bookmarklet out in Chrome, but it worked pretty smoothly in Firefox.

Here’s the background: A couple of weeks ago, when it launched “Search plus Your World” by default for English-language users, Google said that other social networks like Facebook and Twitter don’t let it crawl deeply enough to provide “secure and consistent access” to their users’ private content. So, SPYW could, for the most part, only include Google+ content.

That’s a bit of a ruse, because there’s lots of public content from social networks that Google already indexes. It’s not hard to find Twitter handles and LinkedIn profiles in Google search results. When SPYW launched, Twitter loudly called foul, and people at Facebook complained more quietly.

The thing is, SPYW doesn’t just give preference to private Google+ content in personalized search results. It also actively promotes Google+ profiles and other public content in various locations throughout the search page.

Google+ profiles — but not content from any other social network — now show up in a new “People and Pages” box that sometimes appears in place of ads on the right side of Google’s search-results page, as a type-ahead suggested query within the search box, and interspersed high up in search results for many brands.

Ross and his buddies used Google’s own organic search results and “Rich Snippets” tool to find the social network content that Google already indexes and ranks normally. The bookmarklet then integrates those diverse results into places where Google+ content is exclusively promoted.

This was an independent and unofficial effort, but Facebook is hardly disavowing it. In fact, a Facebook spokesman praised Ross’s voice-over talent (that’s him speaking in the video) in an email to AllThingsD.

While this feistiness makes for a fun story, the moral high ground might be a dangerous spot for Ross to claim.

Facebook notoriously hoards its members’ friend graphs and user emails, doling out access only to partners that it doesn’t see as direct competitors. Users who wish to remove and transport their data to another service are stifled at every turn.

Further, Facebook limits access to search engines, having required Microsoft’s Bing to sign a deal to access content that’s mostly public already. And it’s not like the company provides its own democratic search engine to compete with Google.

(Photo credit: Flickr user StampyTurtle)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

This bluntness of friend relationships has been a major perceived weakness of Facebook, one that competitors like Google+ and start-ups like Katango have worked to address in their own products.

Still, Facebook has more than 750 million users — so even if it’s reacting to others, its changes will have more impact. But there’s no question the company is fixing this issue after other people have gotten to it first.

Here are the new features (some of which had leaked as part of user testing): Over the next two weeks, all Facebook users will be offered lists of what the site understands to be their work, school, family and city connections. These “Smart Lists” will be updated automatically though users can edit them as well. Users can publish to specific lists and filter their news feed to see only those lists.

Facebook is also giving users the option to manually create three lists that address different levels of relationships: “Close Friends” — where you’ll see everything they post, and can even get notifications for new posts — “Acquaintances” — where you only see the most important things they post — and “Restricted” — where they only see your public content.

So for example, your spouse might be a “Close Friend,” someone you met at a conference might be an “Acquaintance,” and your boss might be “Restricted.”

Previously, Facebook had deemphasized the four-year-old Friend Lists feature, offering alternatives like a Groups tool where members can add and see each other. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this was because managing friends is hard, and fewer than five percent of Facebook users had ever even used the Friend List tool.

So what changed? In an interview, Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross shrugged off the notion that Facebook is following competitors. Rather, he said, it’s that Facebook has grown so large that people hold off on sharing because they’re talking to too many people.

“It’s very hard to talk to all of these people at once and say something global and relevant to all of them, and even harder to see all their updates to you,” Ross said.

“You’re literally starting to become connected to everyone on Facebook that you know in real life,” he added. “It’s almost paralyzing.”

Ross said he anticipates that once users are more sure of which people they’re sharing with, they will share more content on Facebook.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Bret Taylor

But there’s also a pattern emerging for what happens to that talent once folks arrive at Facebook. Acqhired CEOs hold prominent roles on Facebook’s product team; nearly every recent Facebook product launch seems to have been led by an acqhired employee. Most recently, Facebook Messages was product-managed by Dan Hsiao, who joined the company with the FriendFeed acquisition. Hsiao had actually been a more junior member of the FriendFeed team, having started there as an intern in 2008. Now he is managing what Facebook called the largest engineering team it has ever put together for a launch.

Meanwhile, former FriendFeed CEO Bret Taylor is CTO of Facebook. Hot Potato CEO Justin Shaffer was product manager for Facebook Groups and is now product manager for the company’s Places and Events products (his company was only acquired in August). Divvyshot CEO Sam Odio is now product manager for Facebook Photos. Nextstop CEO Carl Sjogreen now holds the title “head of platform development,” according to a Facebook spokeperson.

And Gokul Rajaram, known for his seminal work as a product manager on Google AdSense, is now in charge of Facebook’s ad technology. Rajaram came to Facebook through the acquisition of his company Chai Labs, also last August. Multiple sources confirmed Rajaram’s role at Facebook, though Facebook declined to.

Gokul Rajaram

Facebook has its reasons for keeping a big-name hire like Rajaram under the radar; for one, Google can’t be happy to have lost the opportunity to buy his start-up. The former Googler has been an adviser and director to multiple companies, including Canoe Ventures and Associated Content.

Elsewhere, Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt from Facebook’s first acquisition, Parakey, have had significant roles on products like Facebook Questions and the Facebook iPhone app. Ross’s title is Director of Product, though he is currently on sabbatical. Hewitt is working on undisclosed projects but “more on the engineering side,” said the spokesperson.

Facebook is not yet talking about where it will assign Sam Lessin, CEO of the just-acquired storage start-up Drop.io, and Cory Ondrejka and Bruce Rogers, founders of the just-acquired gaming start-up Walletin.

Facebook says it has about “two dozen PMs,” so the acqhired folks account for a significant but not dominant portion of that corps.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told me last month:

We have a big footprint but we want to operate like a startup and take risks, and the best way to do that is to get people who self-select towards being entrepreneurs… The only real theme is that we haven’t bought any companies yet to get the company. It’s always been because we have a lot of respect for the people involved.

This kind of track record may make Facebook an even more enticing acquirer for small start-ups. On the other hand, it’s probably disheartening for Facebook’s homegrown talent to see these opportunities handed to people who are brand-new and who, in many cases, have little experience working at the scale of hundreds of millions of users.

*Facebook has also explored larger acquisitions of companies like Twitter and Foursquare (though Kara Swisher reported those talks were less serious than portrayed elsewhere), but those deals were never consummated.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Bret Taylor photo (CC) Brian Solis.

Now comes Facebook. The social network has had its own question service in a private beta for some time, but it’s finally come clean about it, via a blog post from product management boss Blake Ross.

The service is still in beta, which means that not all of you will be able to see it immediately. But I can, and I can report that… it’s a question service. As previously reported, it’s somewhat like Quora, the superhot question service founded by Facebook vets.

For my money though, it’s considerably easier for newbies to jump into than Quora, primarily because you’re likely to immediately see queries from your friends–or at least, the Facebook equivalent of friends.

The version I’ve been playing with this afternoon is also buggy–it is having a hard time guiding me to question categories–but I assume that will get fixed quickly.

My question, which I posed using Facebook’s new tool: To what end?

Search engine optimization pros will tell you that question services do great on search results, so I suppose that’s good for Facebook. And if Facebook’s service takes off, it gives users one less reason to head to a rival to lob in their queries.

But many Facebook users I know are already asking their friends for advice using the service, and I’m not sure that formalizing the process–and making the process “public and visible to everyone on the Internet”–will prompt them to do more of it. We’ll see.

“Blake and Joe built the Firefox Web browser and then turned to the developer community to build on top of the foundation they’d established, not unlike what we’ve done with Facebook Platform,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “The work they’ve done with Firefox and Parakey and their approach to building products fit right in at Facebook.”

I guess they must. Facebook describes Parakey’s technology as a platform “bridging the gap between information on the Web and the desktop.” Which should go quite well with Facebook’s platform of “bridging the gap between Friendster (or TheGlobe.com) and a successful multibillion-dollar exit plan.”

“Blake and Joe built the Firefox Web browser and then turned to the developer community to build on top of the foundation they’d established, not unlike what we’ve done with Facebook Platform,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “The work they’ve done with Firefox and Parakey and their approach to building products fit right in at Facebook.”

I guess they must. Facebook describes Parakey’s technology as a platform “bridging the gap between information on the Web and the desktop.” Which should go quite well with Facebook’s platform of “bridging the gap between Friendster (or TheGlobe.com) and a successful multibillion-dollar exit plan.”