Time to check your privacy settings, Facebook’s Graph Search has landed

The impact of Facebook’s new Graph Search feature will likely take some time to appreciate, not least because it is currently in “very limited beta”.

The initial launch is restricted to just four areas – people, places, photos and interests – but already it feels like the feature is intended to be all things to all people.

Indeed, the disparate suggestions from the social network on how Graph Search could be used, ranging from dating to music suggestions to restaurant advice, give an indication of the scale of Facebook’s plans, if not users’ actual desire to search their friends’ information on such a fine level.

One audience group the company is particularly keen to win over is journalists and it looks at how journalists can use Graph Search in some detail.

Digital Intelligence in PME, September and October 2012

Time for a quick roundup of my recent, new look, Digital Intelligence columns from PME.

The magazine got a gentle redesign in September and, in keeping with this, I started taking a longer, more thoughtful look at issues in Digital Intelligence.

First up was a critical look at the usability and discoverability of pharma content in September’s PME followed, in the October issue, by some thoughts on Boehringer Ingelheim’s Facebook game Syrum.

The digital pharma news that previously made up the Digital Intelligence section can still be found online in the Digital Intelligence blog and, playing around with Delicious tag bundles, links to blog highlights are featured each month.

Facebook’s imperial phase

There’s no shortage of global ambitions at Facebook, but the changes it’s due to make next week look set to catapult the social network into a whole new imperial phase.

It has always had a rather bullish attitude to both competitors and, somewhat more surprisingly, its own users.

New launches are designed to attack emerging threats, whether through the addition of the newsfeed (Twitter), Places (Foursquare) or by refining Friend Lists (Google+).

The Netherlands – a world leader on Twitter and LinkedIn

A new Comscore study of social networking in The Netherlands shows the country to have a unique place in the online world.

For a start it ranks number one around the globe for use of Twitter and Linkedin – each of the two sites attracts more than one in four Dutch Internet users during the course of the month.

What’s curious about this dual position is that while the top ten countries for Linkedin penetration are either English-speaking or in Western Europe, the top countries for Twitter are much more diverse – after The Netherlands come Japan, Brazil, Indonesia and Venezuela. (See the lists below for the full run down.)

Facebook’s European dominance

Facebook friendships in Europe visualised

I came across an interesting Comscore report on social networks in Europe a while back and have been meaning to blog about it ever since.

That social networks are hugely popular with online Europeans is one of the more obvious observations in the Europe Digital Year in Review – it’s perhaps up there with the conclusion that Facebook leads the pack.

But Comscore does provide some useful detail on this, noting that Mark Zuckerberg’s site is the top social network in 15 of the 18 countries surveyed.

Facebook courts journalists

Facebook wants more journalists to use its social network and has put together a guide explaining how they can get started.

Whether it can lure journalists away Twitter with the offer of sharing ‘best practices’ is unlikely, but Facebook has a rather more direct hook up its sleeve.

“Reach your readers directly on Facebook, an audience of more than 500 million people around the world,” the new Journalists On Facebook page boasts.