Facebook posted late last night that they were opening up their canvas pages to search robots in an effort to make facebook more accessible to the masses who still do not have facebook accounts. This is a significant move on their part, for multiple reasons: 1. it turns on the power of millions and millions of pages of user generated content and their related search bait, and 2. it will allow for app developer’s pages to be indexed and in turn serve contextual ads on them.
Facebook has just cast its net even wider in its attempt to capture more users than myspace. I would not be surprised if we see some interesting analysis of search traffic coming into app pages soon that reflects google as an ever increasing part of app traffic.
This has some privacy implications though, and facebook is saying they will filter the data visible to people outside of facebook on a per user basis, but that could be harder to pull off than they realize.
