Facebook's Next Big Thing (Live Coverage)

We are live from the Facebook mystery event at their headquarters in Menlo Park.

Lots of speculations regarding what will be shown today. Here's some of the most popular ideas and thoughts being thrown out there:

• A Messenger
• Search engine, something like Chrome.
• Charging to use Facebook features.
• Customizable profiles
• Integrated photo-editor
• Integrated video-chatting, similar to Skype
• Improved and new business solutions.
• HTC/Facebook phone collaboration.

The presentation should start any minute now...

Mark Zuckerberg is now on stage!

Mark Zuckerber is talking about the "three pillars." One being the News feed, timeline and graph search.

Web search VS. Graph search.

I.e., a search for "hip hop" -- web search will take any open ended query and return links. Graph search is intended to give you the answer -- not links that might give you the answer.

They are demoing how Graph Search works. This is not keyword search, he points out. Graph search is structured. ie, "friends who like star ways and harry potter."

He says it's a powerful recruiting tool. Friends of current employees is a good place to start with recruiting. For example, "NASA Ames Research Center employees who are friends with Facebook employees."

Graph Search is only available in a limited preview. You can sign up to get on the Graph Search wait-list here: www.facebook.com

He's addressing privacy, knowing full well this could be an issue.

Zuckerberg is back on stage. "this is one of the coolest things we've done in a while." He emphasizes how early it is. Calls it a beta product.

Even so, Graph Search is a completely new way to get information on Facebook.

With Graph Search, you get a powerful tool and a world class search engine at the same time. People won't come here to do Web searches all the time -- that's not the intent -- but if they need to, they can use Bing. .

Search is a big project and will take years and years to mature. In the future, we want to get to mobile. The only reason we didn't do mobile first is that our mobile engineers have been working on apps.

Decided English was a logical place to search. Eventually, we will add all and get to Open Graph

Facebook will start a limited beta today and start rolling it out very slowly.

Big thanks to Paul Sloan for this content.