Facebook began as a place for college connections, secluded from the prying eyes of the outside world, but today that era is officially over. Major Facebook investor Microsoft announced this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit that it has closed deals to bring status messages from both Twitter and Facebook into the search results of Bing.com. Twitter search is live now, Facebook is forthcoming.
Facebook is opening up to a search engine - that's very big news. Only content from accounts marked public will be indexed by Bing, but it's a sea change none the less. Facebook has an explicit, acknowledged agenda to make more people comfortable sharing more information publicly - once they do, that information will be searchable on Bing. This 'aint your big sister's Facebook anymore.
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Facebook opened on-site search across user profiles and messages late this summer. The company has been careful to only expose information from people who have opted-out of their own default privacy settings and we don't expect this Bing deal to be any different. While some peopl