Facebook has opened up some new search tools, which means some discussions you used to think you had a chance to have in privacy on that system are now open to the world to look through.

Some local examples will illustrate.

If this is of interest to you, an earlier post on 5 expert ways to search for Ann Arbor information is a next place to go.

The evolution of privacy on Facebook

Facebook, when it was originally launched as "The Facebook" at Harvard, was a terribly, terribly exclusive system. You could only get online if you were affiliated with a small set of elite schools, and the system was structured so that you could only be a part of conversations with people who were your friends.

Move forward to 2010, and the Facebook expectations of privacy have completely been overturned. The default settings for conversations and personal settings are to be public, not private, and a whole new set of programming interfaces have been put into place to make searching the system in real time relatively easy to program.

This analysis oversimplifies horribly; for an in-depth analysis, my favorite commentators are Forbes (on Facebook's corporate reaction to privacy issues) and Wired (with some hyperbole asserting that Facebook has gone rogue), and Jason Calcanis (with some more hyperbole) asking if Facebook is unethical, clueless, or unlucky.

Searching public Facebook updates with Booshaka

A new site, Booshaka, has launched to provide real time search access to Facebook public updates. The founders say casually on their site that they launched it "in one day." Search results are similar to all systems that let you look for things in real time, with a list of results in simple chronological order and a big space on the right side of the screen for advertising. There's a brief on Killer Startups, but otherwise not much written about this brand new company.

If you're tracking local news, here are some searches to bookmark through this service that would let you see what people are thinking.

Search Facebook public updates for Ann Arbor. The search results from this instant show just under an hour worth of updates. People are talking about today's Red Day food drive at Keller Williams, last night's Goo Goo Dolls show, a trip to the Children's Museum (presumably the Hands-On Museum), the city's agreement with the DEQ to take out the stop log at Argo Dam, and Devo's show in Ann Arbor at the Summer Festival on July 6.

Search Facebook public updates for Ypsilanti. Search results show 14 hours worth of mentions. Mixed in with the personal chatter, which may not have been intended to be quite as personal as people realized, is an announcement on Ypsi City List of a public hearing May 18, 2010 at 7 p.m. on a Headlee Rollback Charter Amendment to fund public transportation, a reaction from Firefighter Hourly praising the Ypsilanti decision to avoid firefighter layoffs, and a video of the Ypsilanti Community Band in anticipation of its May 27 concert.

Search Facebook public updates for AnnArbor.com. Search results go back 12 hours. Facebook readers with public updates are linking to our stories on Dicken School, the Saline Girls track victory, and the obituary for Grace Bacon.

The implications of search on behavior

At the moment, most people who are posting updates to Facebook don't know or expect that someone like me might be searching for them. This might be because they don't know or understand the implications of Facebook's privacy settings, and don't know how to change how their updates are seen.

When people who desire more privacy decide that Facebook isn't a good place to have discussions, they will move to some other system - email, some new social network, phone calls or text messages - and thus the set of interesting things that they would otherwise write in a place where readers like me could find them will go away.

On the other hand, organizations that are mostly in the business of pushing a particular message to the world - whether that's public relations, publicity, advertising, or spam - will gravitate increasingly toward systems like Facebook as they see ways to expand the number of people who can see the things they want to write.

However interesting the current results from systems like Booshaka are, the very existence of a search engine for conversations will change the conversations that happen in that place.

Edward Vielmetti has been searching the internet since 1985. Contact him by phone at 734-330-2465, or mention his name somewhere on Facebook.