Yesterday, after posting an item about Facebook's new policy that will allow profiles to be searched within Google, Yahoo and others, we took a look at Danny Sullivan's great piece that claims the feature isn't new at all. In it he said, *"Tom Critchlow at Distilled wrote about these options being live back in July. By the end of the month, by linking to his public listing using his name as the anchor text, he found that listing at Facebook ranking well within Google." *
Looking for confirmation of Sullivan's claims we reached out to the company and Facebook's Meredith Chin (pictured right
) essentially confirmed Sullivan's findings by telling us, *"Previously, a public listing was only available if a user purposely posted the link to the listing somewhere a crawler could find it." *So yes, Facebook listings have been public for a while if you were clever enough to offer a link that Google could latch onto. Thus the new announcement is probably more of a fair warning to users concerned about privacy than any genuinely new feature set.
