No Facebook, Mobile is Not Tomorrow
It isn't a matter of Graph Search suffering from a lack of vision or that it isn't the big technical achievement that it's billed as (it is by the way), it's that for Facebook mobile is tomorrow. They even said as much during their presentation. And if the year were 2010 or earlier that way of thinking might be reasonable, but it's 2013 and the mobile is today. Not only is mobile today, mobile is it. There is nothing else; if you're not a mobile first company then you aren't a competitive company plain and simple. I understand that it's hard and time consuming to build a product and that at times there is a desire to do a slow rollout as to not absolutely kill your servers and to hopefully catch some bugs in the process. Facebook decided to release Graph Search to desktop users first with a mobile version coming some time in the future. Regardless of whether it's a product people actually want the mobile version should clearly have been the first to see release if not at the same time. It's a search, recommendation, and friend list product, which are things that have their greatest consumer value on mobile. If I'm looking for a place to eat and remember my friend suggesting a place they went to, I am not going to get on my computer, log in to Facebook, and then search. I'm going to either text or call my friend; that means use my phone. If I know that Facebook can provide me that information immediately on my phone without having to see if my friend picks up or wait for his response text then I am going to use that. It's about putting the information where I want to access it not just that it is accessible. This is where Facebook failed. I hear some bitching about Graph Search as if it is sign of them playing catchup, but just a couple years ago we all eagerly awaited a search product from them. Graph Search is interesting and is an obvious inclusion into Facebook, but what is needed is a major overhaul of what Facebook is and how we use it. Such a design shift has been rumored to be coming soon to mobile along with further timeline-ification of the desktop site. I once wrote that Timeline was Facebook's big design forward push to creating an emotional attachment with user a la Apple, but Graph Search and "mobile tomorrow" thinking show that Facebook heading down the Microsoft path: universally accepted yet undesirable.
