Facebook Inc.'s new public search feature is surely prompting the many startups that specialize in people search to huddle with their venture backers to figure out whether the social network's move is a death sentence, or the best thing that could happen to them. On its way to becoming an operating system for social networking, Facebook is letting standard search engines, including Google and Yahoo!, index its profiles, transforming Facebook "from being a social network to being quasi-White Pages of the Web,” blogs Om Malik.

At first glance Facebook’s new feature looks like bad news for people search startups, such as Spock Networks Inc., Wink Technologies Inc., ZabaSearch LLC and Zoom Information Inc. But as ZDNet’s Steve O’Hear points muses:

“If Facebook continues to grow and eat into the social functionality of other web services, then people search could end up, largely, meaning Facebook profile search. Were that to happen then Spock et al. could be left in the dust. On the other hand, by making public profiles on Facebook indexable, might it actually help competing people search engines as they can now legitimately spider Facebooks data?”

Facebook's initiative competes most directly with Spock.com and Wink.com. Other information gathering services, such as ZabaSearch LLC (which delivers personal information including addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and even Social Security numbers) and Zoom Information Inc. (which specializes in search services to prospective employers, aggregating biographical data on professional people from Web sites, press releases, and various other sources) may find Facebook just makes their jobs easier.

For more insights into the ways that new media companies are reshaping industries, be sure to attend Tech Confidential's Convergence 2.0 Conference on September 17 in New York City. —George White

See Facebook's announcement
See post from Om Malik
See story from ZDNet
See Dec. 2006 story on Spock’s venture financing from TheDeal.com
See more on Tech Confidential's Convergence 2.0 conference

Tags: facebook, vc, venture+capital