#SOPA Curation: If Facebook Wants to Curate, It Needs to Get Better at Search

Image via CrunchBase

Vadim Lavrusik, the journalist ambassador at Facebook, today pointed to a well curated media expereience that focuses on the #SOPA fiasco.

I think the curation was a great idea, but I have concerns about how Facebook manages curation and how it organizes search to find curation.

Right now, Vadim and I are talking this out in a comment thread on his profile, but I want to take my points and put them here.

This is what I expect if I am seeking a curated moment in media. Notice that my comments evolve in to ideas about how Facebook could be better at search, what I believe to be a key component to curation. How will you find what you need to find?

There are several expectations that I have as an audience or a participant in curated themes, news, items, or content:

1. Relevancy: is it easy for me to discern at what point in time this is relevant? Was this from an age ago? Is this now? Is this later? (Search rears its head here, because Search allows me to filter backwards in time in some cases)

2. Is the content meaningful? Curation handles his well.

3. Structurally, is it easy for me to identify that the curated media is about the theme? Or, is it about the curator? In Facebook, it’s usually about the person filtering, because things are classified primarily by personal identity. The ticker highlights both the person curating and the comments around the curation, but not often the thing curated. Notifications serve to deliver people to a person so that people are constantly reinforcing a personal connection. I believe this is the marketing language around much of Timeline when Mark Zuckerberg spoke at F8, and later.

4. My other expectation is that I can constantly visit a theme or a curated idea. In FB, I find that hard to do. I can’t — here is search again — go back to a specific point in time easily. I don’t know where to look. If I had a search capability that would allow me to input “theme” and find the themes, rather than the people, being discussed I would have an easier time locating a curated experience. Facebook actually doesn’t have to choose

Image via Wikipedia

between being about people or being about media content. If they are trying to make people in to remote controls for video and TV content, or music content, or if they are trying to make people hubs for publishing legacies, then they need to find a way to blend it so that it can be approached form both sides of the fence. You are doing really well at being a marketer for the journalists who need an audience. This will eventually pull much of the media content from legacy publishing platforms into Facebook. But the experience and the “searching” for that experience is disorderly.

Right now, I found out about SOPA curating through you. You are a person. Unless you are on some robotic schedule I can’t depend on any person to consistently deliver me to the right thing every time. But if I search for it, I will find it every time. IF it’s set up to be searched.

 

And Lavrusik responds, roundly, with a good point, though I don’t think I am missing the point. My point is that the average user may not know these expectations because they are not given the ability to experience the result of having them. Says Lavrusik:

You’re missing one of the big points here. Much of the discovery happens through people you’re connected to and not search…for the average user. You’re not the average user, so it’s important to remember how the average user interacts with content. It’s usually not the same way we do