Facebook Nudges Users to Catalog the Real World

More than one billion people visit Facebook each month, mostly to see photos and messages posted by friends. Facebook hopes to encourage some of them to do a little work for it while they’re there.

By asking people to contribute data—from business locations to book titles—and to check one another’s work, Facebook is building a rich stock of knowledge that could make its software smarter and boost the usefulness of its search engine. “We’re trying to map what the real world looks like onto Facebook so you can run really expressive and powerful queries,” says Mitu Singh, product manager for Facebook’s entities team.