Facebook Graph Search now finds comments, status updates

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the unveiling of Facebook Graph Search in January

Facebook announced an update to Graph Search on Monday that will enable users to search for conversation topics within status updates, comments and posts. Some users with Graph Search can now browse Facebook for topics of interest — for example, "posts about Breaking Bad" or simply "Breaking Bad."

The update also allows users to search for posts or comments from a certain time period or location (for example, "posts by my friends from last month") or posts that they already composed or commented on.

The update makes Facebook much more conducive to real-time conversations, an area where it has been making major strides to compete with the likes of Twitter. The two social networks have been competing for eyeballs during primetime television events like the Emmys, the NFL's Monday Night Football, and Sunday's Breaking Bad finale.

When users' eyes aren't glued to the TV screen, Facebook and Twitter want them to be having conversations or voicing their opinions on their respective networks.

Opening up Graph Search to enable post and comment searches will help Facebook to do so. When a user logs into his profile during a primetime event, he can quickly scan all conversations about the game or his favorite show — even if he isn't near the top of the News Feed. If a user want to talk about an event hours (or even days) later, he can search for all relevant conversations on Facebook, something users can't easily do using Twitter.

Facebook has been working to add partnerships around live media in an attempt to fuel this social conversation. Earlier this month, the social network announced a content deal with FOX Sports to promote Facebook data and conversations alongside live NFL and college football broadcasts. Facebook has also added features like searchable hashtags and verified accounts in an attempt to make finding topics of interest easier on the platform.

Facebook reported on its Q2 earnings call that 88 to 100 million people are actively using the social network during primetime television hours — a number that Facebook advertisers will pay close attention to.

Twitter is making similar efforts ahead of the company's IPO; the company is expected to file its public IPO papers as soon as this week. Just last week, Twitter announced ad partnerships with both CBS and the NFL, which will bring real-time video into your Twitter stream.

Facebook's search update is not yet available to all Graph Search users, according to a company spokesperson. It will be tested starting on Monday with a small group of users and will roll out more expansively after that. Users will only be able to search for content that has been shared with them, in addition to public posts. In other words, your conversations should not appear in a search run by someone outside of your network unless your comments and posts are public.

Oops! BlackBerry even worse off than it thought

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins doesn't have much to cheer about lately.

More bad news for BlackBerry. The smartphone company said Wednesday that its business is in even worse shape than what it reported just a few weeks ago.

BlackBerry (BBRY) said the 4,500 employees it is laying off by the end of the year will cost $400 million -- four times as much as the company had previously expected. That's particularly bad news, since BlackBerry is racking up giant quarterly losses and rapidly burning through its cash.

The company is also quickly losing its appeal in key markets. BlackBerry said Wednesday that customers in typically loyal international markets are switching allegiances to Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) Android devices.
BlackBerry also said consumers are looking for devices with the largest number of apps. That's definitely not BlackBerry's forte.
Related story: Terrible apps killed BlackBerry
Making matters even worse, BlackBerry said that its core base of corporate customers are also now looking towards greener pastures. Long delays in the BlackBerry 10 platform have angered corporate IT departments, which like to deploy new BlackBerry phones and software together.
Many business professionals have been demanding Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) iPhones and Android devices for years. But BlackBerry said it was surprised by the rate at which it is losing support from corporate customers.
The company also said that uncertainty surrounding its ongoing "strategic review" impacted demand for BlackBerry smartphones -- something that should impact sales to an even greater extent now that the company has announced plans to go private.
Shares of BlackBerry fell 2.5% Wednesday morning.
Wednesday's financial release was an update to its latest quarterly report on Friday. BlackBerry announced a $965 million quarterly loss, which included a $934 million charge for unsold BlackBerry Z10 devices, the first phone launched on the new BlackBerry 10 operating system.
BlackBerry said it delayed the full report of its numbers due to its ongoing negotiations to be taken private by Fairfax Financial, a Canadian insurance company.

Website maps 1.2 billion Facebook faces

A new interactive site lets you scroll through Facebook profile pics in chronological order.

Facebook has so many users -- more than a billion, or roughly the population of India -- that squeezing them all into one Web page seems almost impossible.

And yet someone has done just that.

A new project, "The Faces of Facebook," collects more than 1.27 billion Facebook profile photos on one site, arranged in chronological order according to when the person joined the social network. Users can sign in via Facebook to pinpoint their photo on the page and see where they show up in relation to their friends.

At first glance, the site looks like colorful, pixelated white noise. But users can zoom in to see individual photos and then scroll around or click on a photo to visit that person's Facebook page. (Be warned, however: the page is experiencing heavy traffic and can be slow and buggy.)

The site launched last week and was built by Natalia Rojas, a self-described "creative technologist" in Barcelona, Spain.

"I was playing around with Facebook API, and I discovered that there is a way to access everyone's public information with a very simple (but not obvious) algorithm," she said in an e-mail to CNN. "At that time, I thought I could do something beautiful/interesting with that, like showing them all together. Then I started to write the code to achieve it."

Rojas said she is not breaking Facebook privacy rules because she is not storing anyone's name, photo or private information -- just linking out to public Facebook profiles. She also said she hasn't heard from the social network, which she thinks is good news because "I was a bit worried about things like using their name in the URL."

Facebook did not repond to CNN's request for comment.

Rojas said it took her a year and a half to code the site. The hardest part, she said, was stripping out the default silhouette images that appear on some inactive Facebook profiles.

Asked about her hopes for the project, Rojas said she was inspired by the idea that each Facebook profile photo is an example of that person's best self, and that millions of those images together combine to present a positive, universal message.

"There is a mix of people from all over the world. And somehow we are all telling our friends: 'Look, this is me, when I like myself.' Feeling happy, being creative, looking good, being passionate about something, proud of something, enjoying the life," she said.

"So I think, why don't we try to BE our Facebook profile picture? Even if life is difficult some times, there is always a way for us to be what we want to be: happy."