Facebook is testing a new way for page owners to create “unpublished posts” — those that intentionally do not appear to all fans of their page – directly from the composer on their page.

Unpublished posts do not appear on a page’s Timeline or in fans’ News Feeds, but they can be promoted with ads. This allows page owners to make posts that are tailored to a specific audience and ensure that they are only seen by that audience, not distributed to anyone who Likes the page. It also creates a way for advertisers to test different creative options for their page post ads without overwhelming their fans with multiple posts.

Now page owners can make these kinds of posts directly from their page by clicking the clock icon used to schedule posts. After users select a year, a “hide from News Feed” option will appear. Checking that box will prevent the post from being distributed to fans’ feeds, though it will still appear on the page’s Timeline. Then a page could promote the post or use it as part of a page post ad in the mobile or desktop News Feed.

Although this feature is hard to discover and not particularly intuitive for most page owners, it is useful to have the “hide from News Feed” option in the composer. Previously, users could only create unpublished posts via the self-serve ad tool, Power Editor or API. The image below is from the ads tool, after selecting “Promote Page Posts” and “Create New Page Post.”

Facebook first added the option for pages to make unpublished posts through the Pages API in July 2012, but these posts were only eligible for promotion in the right hand sidebar of the site. In March of this year, however, Facebook opened up its News Feed inventory to ads created from unpublished posts.

Facebook offers some page post targeting by age, gender, location and other demographic information, there is no organic way to target posts by interests or factors like Custom Audiences. But with unpublished posts that run as page post ads in News Feed, businesses can show users more relevant content. For example, service could show longtime users one version of an ad, new users another, and leads yet another. Or an app page could make an unpublished post to promote to iPhone users and another aimed at Android users. Other brands are using unpublished posts simply to test different ad creative and optimize their campaigns.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Editor’s note: Keith Teare is the founder of just.me and a partner at Archimedes Labs. He is also the co-founder of TechCrunch. Follow him on Twitter @kteare.

Because of Google I/O, this was a momentous week for those of us who are watching the rapid transition that is taking place from desktop computing to mobile, and particularly for those focused on mobile-social as I am because of my job at just.me. Here is my take on what we just witnessed.

Standalone Hangouts. Google announced at its I/O event that Hangouts was to be launched as a separate app from Google Plus, taking personal conversations out from the G+ app and putting them into their own space.

Facebook Home problems. AT&T was reported to have decided to discontinue distribution of the HTC First – the Facebook Home Android phone – due to lack of sales. This comes on the back of publicity pointing to a large number of one-star reviews for the software on the Google Play store.

What is at stake?

There are many common themes and questions that underpin the launch and evolution of Hangouts as a separate app and previously led to the decision to launch the Facebook Home product. These products represent two very similar answers to a common question. The primary question is who will users look to to enable their social communications needs on mobile devices?

To set the context for an analysis let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room that is partially driving these decisions.

Mobile Messaging is rapidly becoming the primary way users engage socially on mobile. Figures released this week imply more than 41 billion messages a day are now being delivered via various “Over the Top”  (OTT) messaging apps.

Phones were created as social tools. Smartphones are especially good at being social, integrating text, voice, video and images in an endless number of apps that can serve a user’s needs, and all without the need for a web-based social network.

Users are able to communicate with anybody in their address book anywhere in the world with almost any content mix at any time. This has been compelling to users and has driven the growth of apps like iMessage, WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, KakaoTalk and some other smaller competitors. Almost 750 million users out of a smartphone population of 1.2 billion are already using these apps.

If you are Google, Facebook or almost any other major provider of social communications platforms originally developed for the web, this move to mobile messaging represents a considerable challenge.

Similar challenges exist from media-sharing apps. As users flock to Vine, Snapchat and, previously, Instagram, the social platforms are challenged to continue to be the primary provider of these services to the growing army of smartphone users.

The other core feature of Facebook and Google+, publishing to an audience for all or many to see, are increasingly becoming activities only a few engage in on mobile — and certainly less often than was the case on the web.

What Is A Platform Provider To Do?

If we look out a few years there is really only one product approach available.

That is to build single apps that embrace and extend the current features of the messaging market leaders — hoping to win users over from WhatsApp, LINE, KakaoTalk and WeChat — while also integrating the features of media sharing, private memory collection and publishing into single unified experiences.

Google and Facebook both seem to be pursuing this approach.

Breaking out Hangouts and going after the messaging audience with enhanced features makes sense. But Google also showed Google Now and Voice Search as possible points of integration for all of its mobile-social features. It’s early days here, but Android clearly wants to find a point of integration for all the users’ needs.

Facebook, with Home, revealed its integrated approach, while under the hood it has Messenger, Camera, Pages and the full Facebook app. Poor as Home’s reception has been, Facebook will certainly continue to deepen and refine its integration efforts and its attempt to be the primary UI a user needs on a smartphone.

Vulnerabilities And Strengths Of Mobile-First Companies

WhatsApp and its clones can be thought of as mobile-first companies. Their apps sit on top of the smartphone, particularly the mobile address book, and just help a user chat to their friends, family or colleagues.  Their success is their simplicity and the singular purpose they have addressed.

Insofar as they are vulnerable, it is due to being very narrowly focused on brief “in the moment” conversations in the form of a chat or instant messaging UI. They have added the ability to include media in those conversations, and some voice-calling abilities. But their goal is really momentary interactions with individuals or groups. Their requirement to have both sides of the conversation install the app is another liability.

Human beings have broader needs that are currently served by other single-use apps. Evernote for private memories, email for longer more enduring interactions, social networks like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter for public statements of all kinds and Path or Instagram for photo sharing. This is a little like the era of Windows before Outlook when apps tended to do only one thing and users used many apps.

Can Web Companies Beat Mobile-First Companies?

These recent moves by Facebook and Google represent early moves by the web-era companies to react to the successes of the mobile-first messengers. They certainly do not represent end points in any way, impressive as they are. And there is plenty of time for the mobile messaging apps to respond by offering a broader range of social features. 

There are already clues to the future – provided by users. The continuing use of email on mobile (trillions of messages in 2013) indicates that  users are not entirely catered for by the chat-centric conversational UI. The growth of Vine and Snapchat (single-feature based as they are) indicate not all media-sharing needs are catered for by these apps. There is a lot still to play for.

If we look five years out, it is likely that the iOS and Android core will support a far more integrated set of messaging tools that cater for many of the needs we use single-use apps for today.

Message saving for private use, shared messaging to individuals or groups, media sharing, video and voice messaging (both synchronous and asynchronous), Timelines to look back and recall what we did in the past. These will all be features of the operating system.

As mobile moves from its Windows 3.1 — single-use apps — era to its more integrated future, apps that used to stand alone will have their features sucked into the operating system. Google and Apple have an advantage here of course as they own the operating system.

The Future Is Being Fought Over Now

In that sense the current product focus – decisions about what features to separate into single apps, and how to integrate those into a unified UI all represent the first moves in defining who wins.

Facebook has Messenger, Camera, Pages and its primary app with Home as an integration point.

Google has Talk, Contacts, Mail, Plus, Hangouts perhaps with Now as a point of integration.

Apple is a little behind but has iMessage, FaceTime, Photostream, Mail and Contacts. iOS itself may be the point of integration.

WhatsApp, LINE, KakaoTalk, WeChat and the others will need to move beyond the chat-centric user interface into a broader set of asynchronous messaging features, and a new set of social features, probably with Timeline support, in order to stay ahead of the curve.

The End Of Social Networks And The Start Of A New Era?

The ground has been set for a fascinating next few years as the web-based social platforms seek to own mobile-social messaging and the mobile messaging apps seek to extend into more fully integrated social features.

As of this moment the mobile-first apps have the lead measured by number of users and levels of engagement. To keep it they will need to continue to innovate.

The human race is already social, and the smartphone has everything needed to enable them to act on their social needs. As the growth of OTT messaging and media sharing shows, a user’s social needs are being met with no need for a social network.

In this mobile-social world the only question is, whose software will we all use to enable human social activities? That is what this week was all about.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook place pages now include an option for users to give star ratings to businesses and locations directly from their page on Facebook.com, even if they haven’t been to the location.

Previously, users could rate places from the Local Search section of the mobile app, and only if they had previously checked into the location or been tagged there. Facebook would also use the desktop sidebar to randomly prompt users to rate places they had been. We hadn’t seen a way for users to rate any place at any time they wanted until now. This enables users to go back and rate the places they might not have checked into on Facebook, but it also opens the door to rating manipulation. For instance, a business could ask friends or incentivize fans to give them five-star ratings.

This feature on desktop pages also gives users an easy way to change their rating. Before, the only way we could find to change a place rating was to do so through the activity log, but it could be difficult to find the rating among all of a user’s other actions. Changing a rating is not possible to do from the mobile app.

We also noticed that unadministrated pages now include a way for users to rate and recommend the place. Unadministrated places are often cities, public parks or local businesses that haven’t claimed their page on Facebook.

Although Facebook has had a “recommend this place” feature since 2011, it has only recently begun to emphasize ways for users to share more feedback about the locations and businesses they visit. The social network is also developing the same for content, with users now able to rate books, movies and TV shows as of this week. All of this is building Facebook’s potential as a local search and entertainment discovery platform, and has implications for the businesses and organizations that manage their presence there. More user generated reviews and ratings gives page owners a bit less control over what is displayed on their page and the sentiments revealed there. These ratings could also begin to influence Graph Search and News Feed distribution, introducing another factor for marketers to consider and optimize for.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook today completed its global rollout of the new Timeline design with sections for music, movies, books, fitness and more. Now, it will begin letting users rate content from those sections or from third-party apps.

Facebook says users have added nearly 200 million items to their sections daily. Since Timeline sections launched in March, more than 17 billion songs have been added to people’s music sections through Likes and listening activity from apps. With the option for star ratings on books, movies and TV shows, users will have even more ways to engage with content and add to Facebook’s burgeoning entertainment platform.

The data could improve Graph Search results, News Feed relevancy, ad targeting and other components of Facebook, while allowing third-party apps to be even more personalized and offer users better recommendations. Developers can also build in features to allow users to rate content through their apps using the “rate” action, which was recently added to Open Graph.

A user’s ratings will appear in their Timeline sections under the items they’ve rated, as well as in News Feed stories.

So far, it doesn’t seem ratings will be aggregated and displayed elsewhere, such as on a film’s fan page. Restaurant and other place ratings currently only appear in the Local Search section of the mobile app. App ratings appear in the App Center and when users hover over the app’s name from within News Feed. We can imagine Facebook will eventually incorporate ratings for places and content into more areas of the site when it has a greater number of ratings. For now, though, page owners don’t seem to get any information about how many people added their content to Timeline sections or what they’re average rating is.

On the other hand, Facebook is giving developers more insights about user engagement with sections. App Insights will include analytics on Timeline section impressions and referral clicks to an app. Developers can create a custom section for their app, but it must be reviewed by Facebook and users have to opt in before it can be displayed on their Timeline.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook is hoping to give developers a better way to get discovered and improve Graph Search with its recently tested Sections for Timeline. Today it announced it’s finished rolling out “Sections” that show what apps you use. New today is the ability to add star ratings to movies, TV shows and books that could inform Graph Search results. Also, developers can now track traffic from Sections — to which people add 200 million items each day.

Facebook first started testing the new Sections in mid-March as part of a redesigned Timeline with all user posts in the right column. Now all users have the cleaner looking Timeline with posts and Sections divided rather than mixed up. Down the left column, each content type and app gets its own Section, which you can configure in your profile’s About tab. The Music Section displays what musicians you Like, the Spotify Section shows off what songs you’ve been listening to, and the OpenTable Section features restaurants you’ve favorited or recently ate at.

As I wrote, Sections could be a data goldmine for Facebook’s Graph Search, as they encourage people to forge connections with apps and media they care about. The new ability to rate movies, TV shows, and books could help Graph Search surface the most popular results for queries  like “Books my friends Like.” Right now Facebook is trying to get more of your opinions codified in its graph, and Sections with ratings are a big step in the right direction.

For developers of content consumption apps like Spotify, Hulu, GoodReads and more, Sections will give them another way to grow beyond posts to the news feed. Facebook now has an Insights dashboard specifically for showing developers how much traffic they’re getting from sections. Facebook says “more than 17 billion songs have been added to people’s music sections through Likes and listening activity from apps.” Now Rdio and Spotify can track how those sections are netting them new users.

If Sections catch on and people properly curate them, scrolling through a friend’s sections could be a great way to discover new art and apps. Meanwhile Facebook gets to chow down on the data you volunteer. Give Game Of Thrones a five-star review? Facebook will know to show you more of its Page’s updates in your news feed than a show you Like but only give three or four stars to. Add RunKeeper to your visible app sections and Facebook will probably show you more runs posted by friends.

The fact is that the apps we use and the media we consume are becoming an important way we express ourselves. Facebook wants Timeline to tell you life story, and that story would be incomplete without this data.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is a guest post from Jed Singer, director of client engagement at Stuzo, a creative technology company and Preferred Marketing Developer with Pages and Apps badges.

The Facebook News Feed is becoming evermore critical to engagement on Facebook. When you design branded social solutions, they need to serve as conduits for storytelling. 100x more people are likely to see the stories that your social product or campaign pushes out than will ever actually experience the product or campaign.

This amplification through the Timeline and News Feed is inherently key to awareness and viral distribution of the brand’s message, but it’s even more important because those stories in the Timeline and News Feed are more accessible by mobile users (63 percent of Facebook users) than the solution, itself, today. This focus on the “story” can mean success or failure of the program as it relates to actual business outcomes — the metrics that matter.

There are also other ways to have consumers effectively story-tell through a branded social experience: Rich Media News Feed Experiences. This is an HTML5 experience on mobile and a Flash media unit that is the experience within a promoted page post, or pushed out of a custom experience on Facebook (by either a user or a page). Both can be activated and engaged with directly within the News Feed.

Even into Q2 of 2013, these are rare for brands, but they are extremely effective at engaging users. Some, like Dunkin Donuts, Rovio, and Lexus have leveraged such units in their social repertoire. At Stuzo, we make sure that clients are intimately aware of the possibilities; one of our most successful Rich News Feed Experiences was for People’s Choice Awards this past season, which enabled fans to explore all of the award categories and vote for their favorite nominee. This gives users the full voting functionality in-stream and exposes them to the main business metric for the People’s Choice Awards — votes — without having to leave their News Feed browsing experience.

Another example is AutoTrader’s social inventory search feature, Decide My Ride, which enables users to share out three cars that they’re interested in and have their friends then vote on which they believe the user should purchase. This voting is all done in in-stream in the News Feed, and below, we can see examples on both the desktop and via mobile. This is rich branded interaction and storytelling that is cross-device and directly in-stream.

When do you, as a brand, want to consider these Rich News Feed Experiences on Facebook? Here’s a simple list of questions to ask yourself. Do you have:

• A CRM conversion point, like an email sign-up?
• An engagement conversion, like a social vote or poll answer?
• An awareness conversion, like a social good campaign?
• An off-site traffic conversion with teaser content?
• A lightweight social game that users could preview in-stream?
• A product that could be interacted with via News Feed?
• An inventory that users could explore in-stream?
• A service that customers could reserve in the feed?

The list goes on, and the above should serve as thought-starters. There is an array of potential use cases for Rich News Feed Experiences on Facebook, and to maximize engagement and conversion of your audience, these mobile-accessible, mobile-optimized products are an extremely powerful solutions for your digital and social marketing toolbox.

Jed Singer has been studying, advising, and executing in social since 2006, and has worked with brands across verticals including the National Football League, National Basketball Association, Toys “R” Us, Coach, Procter & Gamble, Anheuser-Busch InBev, MasterCard, CBS, ESPN, and HBO. As director of client engagement at Stuzo, one of the original five Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers, Jed specializes in social strategy, management, and application development.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

As the days go by and developers get their hands on Glass, the basic apps that we need to survive in the wild and share our photos are popping up. Today, Glass To Facebook is available for those who want to post the moments captured with Glass to the social network. It’s the first third-party app that allows you

The setup is similar to that of other third-party apps like GlassTweet, but requires you to give Facebook permissions to post to your timeline. It only takes a few seconds to get going:

After you’ve turned on the Glass To Facebook sharing contact within MyGlass and approve the permissions on Facebook, you’re ready to start posting:

Just take a photo and choose the Glass To Facebook option:

The nice thing about the app is that it creates a photo album for you that will start piling up your Glass-taken photos:

Your photo shows up like any other one would in your friends’ News Feed, too. This means that all of those annoying baby pictures that you see on the daily will now come from the vantage point of the parent’s face. Exciting, I know. On a serious note, it’s nice to see photos from Glass being brought to networks other than Google+, which was the only out of the box option.

While we haven’t heard anything recently about an official Facebook Glass app, we’ve heard that there’s a team of four working on something. What could Facebook look like for Glass? We know that there won’t be ads, since Google isn’t allowing them on the Glass platform as of right now. Aside from that, I wouldn’t mind seeing a Poke pop up on the device.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook and Timelines Inc. have reached a settlement in the trademark case against the social network, according to a document Facebook filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Timelines Inc. operates Timelines.com, a website for people to create and collaborate on historical timelines. The company sued Facebook in September 2011 after it debuted an overhauled profile page it called “timeline.” Timelines Inc. has registered trademarks for “Timelines,” “Timelines.com” and its “Timelines” logo.

Facebook had asserted that its use of “timeline” was generic and qualified as “fair use.” Facebook requested a summary judgment to prevent the case from going to trial, but the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois denied the motion. The case was set to go to trial last week, but then delayed without explanation.

It seems the companies worked out a settlement agreement in the meantime. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, apart from the following in Facebook’s 10-Q quarterly report:

“We are also party to various legal proceedings and claims which arise in the ordinary course of business. Among these legal matters, in two cases, Summit 6 LLC v. Research in Motion Corporation et al., and Timelines, Inc. v. Facebook, Inc., we have reached agreements to settle the matters. The cost of settlement in each case, which is included in the accompanying condensed consolidated financial statements for the three months ended March 31, 2013, was not material to our business, financial condition, or results of operations.”

Through the lawsuit, Timelines Inc. sought to prevent Facebook from continuing to use the term and to receive compensation equivalent to Facebook’s ad revenue generated on Timeline pages. However, it is unlikely the settlement was close to that range. It also seems Facebook will be allowed to continue to use the “timeline” name for its profile product.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment. We’ve reached out to Timelines Inc. for comment, but have not yet gotten a reply.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Today Instagram launches photo tagging, the feature that fueled Facebook’s early growth. New Instagram iOS and Android updates rolling out now let you tag any person or brand in your own photos, which then automatically show up in the “Photos Of You” section of their profile. You get notified when you when you’re tagged, can require approvals before photos hit your profile, and have the option to detag yourself.

[Note that if you're not seeing version 3.5 of Instagram when you go to download the updates, you may have to wait a few minutes for your cluster of the App Store or Google Play to populate with the new version.]

Instagram tells me a year of work went into building the new tagging and Photos Of You section. Until now, people just @mentioned each other in the comments of photos as a hack. However, this didn’t make them much easier to keep track of, you couldn’t say exactly who’s who, and they weren’t hosted together anywhere. The new features are designed to help you more vividly capture moments, build a collection of photos you’re in, and create a curated photo history of yourself on your profile. The Photos Of You section of each person’s profile will remain unpublished until May 16th, giving you time to select whether you want to allow open tagging by any Instagram user, or prefer to pick and choose which appear on you profile.

Photo tag notifications could boost engagement and return visits to Instagram. Photos Of You gives people and brands a new way to curate their Instagram presence, and businesses can show off user-taken photos of them. The data about who tags who and who you’re tagged with could help Instagram provide a more personalized experience or power new forms of discovery. And perhaps one day, businesses might pay to more prominently show photos you’ve taken of them to your followers.

Clicking through reams of tagged photos of friends is an incredibly popular and engaging activity on Facebook. By giving Instagram its own version way to encourage these deep dives into someone’s life, it’s taking the focus off of real-time and opening putting its goldmine of older content on display.

That’s the gist of the new features, and there’s a video showing them off, but now let’s look closer at how they work.

How To Use Instagram Photo Tags

Once you’ve got the latest version 3.5 of your iOS or Android Instagram app, you’ll be able to go to your profile and check out your Photos Of You section. You can select free tagging so every shot tagged with you shows up there, or pre-approvals so you have to approve them before they appear. People who don’t get tagged often will probably be okay with automatic additions to their profile, but brands and celebrities that get tagged often may want to choose pre-approvals so they can offer a manicured presence on Instagram. Instagram has more privacy tips available in its Help Center.

Once you’ve made your decision, and skimmed through any photos of you that have been tagged since the new feature launched today, you can publish your Photos Of You section, similar to how Facebook gave people a curation period to scan their Timeline. On May 16th, whether you’ve published it or not, you Photos Of You Section will begin appearing in your profile.

When you go to upload a photo, you’ll get the option to tap on people or brands they show. You can then search for their name and tag them. Instagram also lets you go back and add tags to your old photos. You can tag anyone, not just people you follow, who follow you, or are your Facebook friends, but you can only add tags to your own photos, not anyone else’s.

Facebook sees the uploader as the story-teller. People will tag their friends, celebrities they spot, or brands that appear in their photos. Brands meanwhile might tag associated businesses or public figures. For example, the San Francisco 49ers might tag individual players in its photos.

When people browse their feed, they’ll be able to tap a photo to reveal who or what’s tagged in it. By hiding the tags by default, the sanctity of your phone-tography is preserved. If you get tagged in a photo you’re allowed to see (any public photo or private photo of someone you’ve been allowed to follow), you’ll get a notification. You’ll get the option to remove or not approve the photo if you don’t want it on your profile, detag it if you don’t want to be associated with it, or report it if it’s a serious problem.

The Future’s In The Photo Graph

Each time you get notified that you’ve been tagged, you’re likely to immediately go check out the photo on Instagram. It’s this same viral reengagement technique that helped Facebook grow so quickly in its early days. Instagram already has over 100 million users, but this could get them spending more time with the app. It also might draw in new users who want to be able to see where they’ve been tagged.

Instagram tells me it hasn’t thought too much about the long-term monetization or data use implications of the features, but they’re sure to help it. Knowing who you get tagged with or who you tag could let it eventually serve you more relevant ads. Tags of brands could power a Sponsored Stories that amplify your word-of-mouth mention of them to more of your friends. Perhaps Instagram could pin these Sponsored Tags at the top of your followers’ feeds, or show them multiple times. Businesses might buy these ads to get more followers themselves. Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday on Facebook’s earnings call that there’s still no immediate plans to put ads on Instagram. That makes sense, as Facebook wouldn’t want to knee-cap growth when Instagram is still adding so many users per month.

As most people can attest, pretty photos of sunsets and latte art are nice, but it’s photos of people that are truly engaging. That’s why these changes could supercharge Instagram, and make it more than just today’s photo feed. With Photo Map and now Photos Of You, Instagram is becoming your photo life.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Lars Rasmussen — one half of the dream team that led in the creation of Facebook’s new Graph Search and run its development — is leaving Menlo Park and setting up shop in Facebook’s office in London. Graph Search, or at least the engineering part that he oversees, is coming with him. I took the opportunity of a quick reconnaissance mission he made to the city this week to ask Rasmussen about why he’s coming to the UK, what is on the road map for Graph Search, internationally and otherwise, and what challenges lie ahead.

Graph Search has yet to launch in any other language other than English, and Facebook’s international user base is growing faster than its U.S. audience. But neither of these are the motivations for his move.

Rasmussen is coming for personal reasons: his girlfriend lives in Athens, and he’s tired of the commute from California to see her. So, because he has no intention of leaving Facebook, he’s decided to move as close as he can to Athens while continuing to work for the social network. And Graph Search, his baby, is coming with him.

How long does he intend to stay? “It’s a one-way ticket,” he told TechCrunch today. It’s also about coming full-circle. Years ago, Rasmussen studied for his PhD in Edinburgh, Scotland and only moved to California to follow his advisor when he migrated west. From there, Rasmussen ended up at Google, where he worked on Google Maps and Google Wave, before in 2010 leaving for Facebook.

For now, where Rasmussen goes, Graph Search engineering goes. So this week, he’s in town not only to find a place to live, but also to lay the groundwork to hire a new team of developers to work on Facebook’s new search efforts from here.

He says he’s put out an offer to the Menlo Park team for any of them to come join him in London. The rest will stay in California and keep working under Tom Stocky, the other Graph Search supremo. “So far no one has put their hand up high to move here but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard a hint or two that some folks are interested,” he said. Rasmussen is moving over permanently in August.

Third pillar, but a moveable one

For a product that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg referred to as the company’s “third pillar” after News Feed and Timeline, Rasmussen’s move and what it will mean for Graph Search sound pretty freeform at the moment.

It’s not exactly clear what part of Graph Search’s development will end up with Rasmussen in London, and what will remain in Menlo Park, nor how the two teams will work together with thousands of miles between them. (Note: from personal experience, it’s possible.) It’s likely that all this will only get decided after they figure out what talent can be recruited — classic Facebook, as one person described it to me.

Rasmussen also says that he can’t say for sure whether Graph Search’s international push will definitely be a part of his work in London because taking it international will not be a quick task.

“When it comes to internationalizing graph search, we may do it here but we may do it elsewhere,” he said. “We’ll only do it when we feel the product is mature and makes sense. We’re still in the beta stages with a million or few million users. Graph Search is a long term investment we realize we have years of work ahead of us.”

He notes that although “internationalizing is the best path forward”, it will only come when the team has “hit the nail on the head with a good search product.”

“We are not talking weeks or a few months, though. It will take longer,” he added.

Natural language, and acqui-hires

One of the big things with Graph Search, as engineer Xiao Li and research scientist Maxime Boucher point out in an essay published yesterday, is that it is built on a natural language interface. But that will pose a challenge when Graph Search goes to other languages.

“I hope that the model that we started creating for English will work roughly speaking for all of our markets, but it’s not something that we have looked too deeply at,” he said. “Graph Search has a natual langauge component, so it will be an extra challenge to internationalize it. It was a challenge we expected because we want to have people ask natural questions, but we realize that it means that it would be a challenge to make new languages. That’s a reason for the long delay.” He added that even though a minority of Faceboook’s users speak English it’s still the single language in which Facebook has the most users.

While Facebook has been pretty good at internationalizing its products, doing so with a product like Graph Search, based on users inputting search commands in their own words, is unchartered territory. Rasmussen said that Facebook may end up having to buy their way into it, as others like Google and Yahoo have been doing.

“It’s possibly an area where we wil have to acquire,” he said. “It is something we’ve invested in in general, but we haven’t quite built the tools out for this thing. So possibly, if the right startup and talent came along, this is definitely something that we would consider. We’ve had some very successful acquisitions of small startups that have brought tremendous talent to the company.”

As for hiring in London, Rasmussen’s looking forward to it and how it could impact Graph Search. “I think there is obviously lots of Euroepan talent speaking different languages so it might come in handy, but again it’s not the primary reason. We are doing research on Graph Search here on par with what Menlo Park is doing.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch