Photos your friends took in New York City. Restaurants in Chicago your friends have been to. People who like running and who live in Denver, Colorado. Friends of friends who are interested in ballroom dancing or hiking.

Facebook’s new Graph Search promises to find all those things, and more, for you. Mark Zuckerberg announced the new way to get really personal in your searches for people, photos, places and interests today at an event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., and the company has put up an explanatory page on the new service here.

While it doesn’t mention Open Graph specifically, the protocol that lets apps model a person’s activities based on actions and objects, it makes sense that the app-specific actions it lets people share on Facebook are feeding into the new search feature.

Read more

A recent interview takes a look at what Facebook’s recent platform changes mean for businesses. It begins, “Recently at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, the company introduced a series of action verbs into its social platform. ‘Read,’ ‘Watch,’ and ‘Listen,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained, were added to help build a ‘language for how people connect.’ The one missing word, of course, was ‘Buy.’ That’s really why Facebook and its army of content partners from news, publishing, music, and film and TV are rushing to set up shop on the famous platform with 750 million users.” Read more