Bubba Murarka

At Bfast on Sunday a few friends and I came up with a feature idea / request for facebook.  What if you could get a feed of friends’ status messages that contain specific words.  This is basically like twitter’s track feature.  Mike Vernal, who just joined facebook from MSFT, was at the table and thought it might already be available.   He said if it was not he’d look into it because it was a good idea.

Turns out that the feature wasn’t there after I fooled around for a bit on facebook.   I sent Mike a quick note letting him know and last night I got a response with the following directions:

Go here:
1. http://www.facebook.com/friends/?status
2. Click on the subscribe link
3. Add a &q=term1+term2+term3 parameter

Dang, that that was pretty fast.  Here is what I am using it for:

I’ve added a bunch of geo related keywords and tracking if any friends (esp. from Seattle) are in the bay area.  this is awesome.  it is like a poor man’s dodgeball when paired with an rss driven sms alerting service (like windows live alerts).

I wonder how long something like that would take to push live at Google, Yahoo, MSFT (not just coding, but the process)?  Of course the better comparison would be at a web company with ~ 500 people at it…but I can’t think of any of those off the top of my head.