Facebook Nudges Users to Catalog the Real World

[Jopa]

 

More than one billion people visit Facebook each month, mostly to see photos and messages posted by friends. Facebook hopes to encourage some of them to do a little work for it while they’re there. By asking people to contribute data—from business locations to book titles—and to check one another’s work, Facebook is building a rich stock of knowledge that could make its software smarter and boost the usefulness of its search engine.

 

Facebook has already collected some information automatically by drawing on data from Wikipedia and other datasets. But, as it has become clearer that the resource would be crucial to ambitions such as search, a new emphasis has been put on finding ways to harness the site’s hundreds of millions of members as a kind of human indexing squad, a flesh and blood version of Google’s Web crawler. “Building classifiers and so on only gets you so far,” says Singh. “At some point you need people to help out.”