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Today I once again encountered a familiar problem.  I was going through my morning routine, and decided to go through a bunch of my old email that had been lying around for some time now.  I came across a Facebook email that said my friend Sarah Marshall (no, not the movie) had shared a link with me.  I was sure that the link had something to do with this awesome sounding farm dinner up in Cape Elizabeth, Maine that Aimee and I had been interested in going to, but didn’t get around to responding.  So I clicked the link in the Facebook email, only to have Facebook redirect me to my wall page, where the link was nowhere to be found.  I spent the next 15 minutes clicking the ‘older’ link at the bottom of the wall page searching for the link that Sarah had shared.  No luck, couldn’t find it – I gave up in frustration.

This experience immediately brought a larger point to my mind – a point that really hits home as to why Twitter, and not Facebook is winning the real-time data game (forget traffic numbers for a minute), and I think I can sum it up in one sentence:  There is absolutely no way for me to search my wall or news feed.  Period.

When Facebook implemented the Twitter-like ‘news feed feature to their service, I was really excited because it would enable me to have more of a Twitter-like experience with people I actually know in my day to day life (i.e. my friends).  More of my personal friends use Facebook (by a long shot), so the prospects to see how my actual friends were answering the Twitter question: ‘What are you doing’ had tremendous potential.

Fast forward to today, and though this feature is great, I end up missing a lot of what people are saying.  Yes, I’m using TweetDeck to get my Facebook feed, but come on – who really has the time to read their FB news feed all the time?  I check it a few times a day, sure – but what I really want is search.  I want to be able to search the text of my friend’s news feed updates and interact with what I find.  It seems like Facebook devalues updates that are older than a few days because they make access to them very difficult.

I also imagine that having this data accessible will make real time search applications (we covered a couple here) even more compelling, not to mention being able to do it all within an app like TweetDeck.  Going forward, I think this feature will be inherently important for FB to add in their fight with Twitter to be the real-time data provider market leader.

As I write this, I realize that Facebook is already starting to implement this feature – as written on their blog:

Today, we’re beginning to test new versions of Facebook Search with a small group — just a fraction of a percent of the people on Facebook. Those of you in the test group will be able to find content from the people, organizations and public figures that matter to you as soon as they share it on Facebook. Testing potential features is an important part of our product development process. These tests tell us if new features benefit people in the way we think they will, what we might do to make them even better, and in some instances, when we need to go back to the drawing board.

Those of you in the test group will see new layouts for search results that will continue to include people’s profiles, Facebook Pages, groups and applications, and some entirely new Search features. With the test, you will be able to search your News Feed for the most recent status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan. You will also be able to search for status updates, posted links and notes in Search from people who have chosen to make their profile and content available to everyone. As always, you can control what content you’re sharing by editing your privacy settings here.