When Facebook’s new Graph Search begins to roll out to the masses, it will focus on four things: people, photos, places, and interests. Those are the key areas that Facebook says the first stage of the new search feature will allow people to explore.
Next on the list, Facebook says they want to add post data and open graph data to the content indexed in Graph Search.
And somewhere down the line, Instagram data. CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed this at today’s big event.
“Instagram data is on the list of things we will one day get to. It’s so clear how much stuff out there you’d want to have in a product like this,” said Zuckerberg at today’s press event.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Facebook is looking to incorporate data from its biggest acquisition into its big new product. Having Instagram photos appear when users perform a photo search, or a search of a business or other location would be a great way to expand the scope of Graph Search. After all, Facebook didn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Instagram to let it sit around.
And Facebook has already been setting the stage for more Instagram integration. Last year, they altered their data use policy to allow for “affiliate” sharing. Instagram later added the same sort of clause to their terms.
“As part of our new collaboration, we’ve learned that by being able to share insights and information with each other, we can build better experiences for our users.
We’re updating our Privacy Policy to highlight this new collaboration, but we want to make sure you understand that you still have control over who sees your photos. You still get to choose who can see your Instagram photos, and you still get to choose whether you post your photos on Facebook. So while we’re looking forward to working closely with Facebook to build better experiences, we aren’t changing the core features of the app that you’ve come to know and love,” said Instagram.
So you can probably expect to see Instagram make its way into Graph Search some time down to road, as Facebook continues to work to make it a better product (it’s currently in beta).
Instagram’s new privacy polices (hotly contested policies, I might add), officially go into effect this Saturday. Facebook’s went into effect last month after the final Site Governance vote.