So I’m off the waiting list and able to use the thing.

Here’s how it looks and a snapshot of what it can do.

So, is it a gimmick or something people will actually use? Here are my initial thoughts:

The more friends you have and the more personal information they fill in, the more useful it becomes. The whole thing relies on them sharing photos, LIKING pages and expressing their interests and passions.

It appears it is not ‘intelligently’ scanning status updates, but simply pulling the personal interests information already available to advertisers. So what’s the value? Well, as Zuckerberg showed in his demo, ‘restaurants my friends like’ is an obvious one. As is ‘hotels people who LIKE NSDesign stay in’ and what about ‘brands people who like Andy Murray like’?

In my opinion, it’s Facebook doing what Google+ claims to be all about. It’s personalising search. Graph Search is still in BETA and will grow and develop in the coming months and years. Many search strings don’t return results and instead, the system defaults to a BING web search.

And despite the passionate cries from the Google+ fans, that’s another reason they should be very worried.

A billion people being served Bing results instead of Google?

Maybe Facebook graph search will be history this time next year. Maybe Google will too.