Facebook Page Browser launches – popular Pages to get even more so

Facebook has just officially launched its Page Browser, which in a way looks  like Bing/Google image search, expect for Facebook Pages.

Here’s a screenshot and more below:

The browser breaks down Pages into ten categories: All, Musicians, Sports, Celebrities, Films, TV programmes, Media, Politicians, Brands and Games. For Pages that you’ve previously Liked, the Page shows up with a blue highlight as you can see in “Facebook Platform”, etc above. All you have to do is to mouseover a Page’s image in the browser and a “Like” icon shows up that you can then click without having to leave the browser (and the Page will then of course have the blue highlight immediately).

The browser, as you would imagine seems to show very popular Pages of each category – for instance, Barack Obama’s Page is #1 in both All and Politicians. However, it doesn’t seem to necessarily suggest the most popular Pages, at least in the All category.

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Addtionally, Facebook has “added a couple fun things like a way for you to discover interests from other countries and a way to see which of your friends is most similar to you,” according to today’s blog post announcing the Page Browser, and sure enough, there is a list called “Friends similar to you” that show which friends have the most “mutual likes”. Pretty interesting.

Of course, this is a huge deal for a number of reasons. First of all obviously, if it works as advertised, it should make it easier for Facebook users to find Pages that they are interested in. Conversely, this is great for Page owners that will now be able to be found more easily – though it would seem that the largest Pages will see the most benefit from the browser over smaller Pages – the Browser is in essence a Suggested User List of sorts, but at least it doesn’t seem too arbitrary, like Twitter’s famously was.

There are right now three things that we see as missing: a dedicated search function within the browser; a way to use the “Friends similar to you” to find more interesting Pages; and of course something that we are sure Facebook will eventually roll out – advertising. Other than these three suggestions, the Pages Browser seems like a whole lot of “win” for both Facebook and Page owners / famous people. It will certainly be interesting to see how this evolves.