With its new “Close Friends” feature, Facebook invites you “Don’t miss the good stuff” by starring your closest friends. What they’re asking in return is the “good stuff” you’ll provide by sharing who among your Facebook friends do you care about the most, want to hear from the most and trust the most?

Why?

Because thanks to social media, how we conduct an Internet search is changing. More importantly, what we expect to see in our search results is changing. What we see now  – and what we can expect to see much more of in the future – is “social search.” Consider it a crossroads between obviously…social media and search.

Think about it. The last time you needed a plumber, a painter or pet sitter, did you go to Google or Facebook? If the latter, did you save yourself the hassle of calling three different companies, comparing estimates and sifting online reviews by just going immediately with the one company that your friend recommended?

Facebook and Google know this and the race is on to build the Internet social search platform that we’ll all want to use and that we’ll all trust. And as a result, the platform that all companies will buy advertising from because that is where we’ll all be.

So, back to starring your friends. If you tell Facebook which 20 people you’d like to hear from most, they will make that happen. They will also keep that information and as Bing’s social search (which by the way incorporates your Facebook data) evolves, use it to push the opinions and referrals of those all-star friends to the top of your search results. You probably won’t notice this right away. If like me, you rarely go to Bing, you might not notice it all. That’s okay because Facebook still needs to collect a lot more data on you and all of its users. But take note, they’re not offering you the good stuff just to enhance your Facebook experience. They’re asking for it so they can collect and process your “good stuff”  as they build their social search.

Personally, I’m on the fence about starring my friends. Social search is coming. And I’ll probably love it once I get used to the idea of so much of who I trust and what I like floating out there for search engines to process, but … still … how much information do I want any one company to have about me?

“Don’t Miss the Good Stuff” Poll
How about you? Have you starred your friends? Has it changed your Facebook experience? How about what appears in your Bing search results? Are your all-star friends showing up in your Bing social search results?