Vikas Vadlapatla became a sensation yesterday after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rolled out a new search feature—which surprisingly put the 27-year old in the spotlight. (
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Facebook was hoping for no surprises when it unveiled its new search feature this week — but that hope lasted all of 15 minutes.
When CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off the new search capabilities before a packed news conference, he surprised at least one single San Francisco man of Indian descent: Vikas Vadlapatla.
Zuckerberg plugged those search terms into Facebook’s new search feature and up popped the photo of the 27-year old.
Vadlapatla, it turns out, is an indirect “friend” to someone on Facebook’s search development team.
Instantly, it seems, he became a celebrity.
“It was crazy,” Vadlapatla told The Post yesterday of his instant fame.
He said the incident led to good-natured ribbing from co-workers and e-mails from friends.
Vadlapatla even got a heart-shaped cake at the office for being single.
“It was a Facebook keynote — more of a fun thing,” he said. “But I don’t know how I feel about the rest.”
By “the rest,” Vadlapatla means the implications of Facebook’s latest offering called Graph Search, a new way to use the social network for finding what friends “like,” places they visit, restaurants they recommend, photos they tagged, places they work and any number of personal results.
Industry watchers said that this is a feature long overdue from Facebook, but it was likely held up because of the profound privacy issues.
Facebook said it engineered its search capabilities with privacy protections out front and center.
Zuckerberg wants no surprises on the part of users when the they start seeing the search options, and the service, now available only to thousands of its billion users, will reach the whole network slowly.
The depth of the results is limited as well — it does not yet recall posts from users, and nothing will be shown that was not already available to users.
Facebook is trying to educate members to review their privacy settings. The power of social search is obvious, and potentially lucrative, but it takes Web search to the next level.
Internet users are still wary of Google’s intrusive gaze, which can crawl the Web and pick up information from the long-ago past of users.
Facebook’s search can do that and put a user’s photo next to it.
Already, Sam Biddle at Gizmodo started testing the search and was able to reveal users with unusual “Like” histories and lax privacy settings.
“[Facebook search] makes it a cinch to find strangers who are openly racist, sexist and generally embarrassing,” Biddle wrote.
Facebook is only sharing what people have already made public, and it is up to users to be aware of their online selves, according to Michael Hussey, chief executive of PeekYou, a people search company.
“The way you act online should be the same way you would offline,” Hussey said. “Assume everyone’s in the room.”