When news breaks, Twitter is often the first place people turn. Watching the #Egypt hashtag today could bring even the most hard-hearted to despair. But given the global attention of todays situation in Egypt, the news has penetrated my Facebook newsfeed and there are a great number of status updates regarding the violent protests taking place in Cairo.
Openbook, a website founded by Peter Burns and Will Moffat is Twitter search, but for Facebook . Burns and Moffat setup Openbook to highlight the flaws of Facebooks privacy policy. However I have been using it as my de facto tool for searching Facebook status updates for breaking news.
Comparing my Twitter Search feeds and Openbook Feeds I find that, Facebook status updates regarding Egypt tend to:
- Use more words
- Are moredetailed
- Be easier to understand
- Can select by gender
- Less real time
- Less updates
- Have no auto-refresh
- Have no unifying term like Twitters hashtag
- Feels more formal/academic
There needs to be a search engine built for the purpose of following status updates on Facebook, however in the mean time Openbook is good at focusing our attention to the potential of the feature. Openbook also shows us that filters such as gender can be applied to real-time news. Facebook has loads more information on its users then Twitter. Which means at the press of one button we will be able to view all updates coming out of Egypt.
There arerumors floating aroundthat Facebook plans to launch its own Search function. If Openbook/Facebook is to become an alternative to realtime tweets Facebook will have to become mo! re open, something its users will not like. If you are new to a breaking story I would recommend doing a search on Openbook due to its slower but morein-depthupdates. Then when you want to intensify the heat jump onto Twitter search.Featured image
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