Facebook Open Graph: What this Monster Means for All of Us
You think you know Facebook? They’re just getting started. With its latest round of plug-in updates, Facebook has unleashed a monster that means it will soon dominate the scene as the web’s most popular destination after Google.
But what does it mean for us? The major announcements at the recent F8 Developer’s Conference in San Francisco unveiled a plan to intensify and expand FB’s ever-growing empire beyond its website, and turn every site across the Internet into satellites where users can interact with friends at all times.
Social Plug-ins
The F8 conference saw a combination of plug-ins released for developers to integrate onto their sites-here’s a quick wrap-up:
• Like Button and Like Box: This allows the Like feature to be added to any piece of content, typically an entire page. Users click on these buttons to Like a site and share a link on Facebook, which is permanently stored on a user’s profile and points back to the original site.
• Activity Feed and Live Stream: These are the plug-ins that show static and dynamic activity on a site. Activity Feed displays recent Likes and comments from the site, while Live Stream shows a real-time view of activity on the site and is intended for interactive events.
• Login with Faces and Facepile: This type of publisher plug-in enhances Facebook Connect, and makes it easy and compelling to sign in by leveraging appropriate Facebook cookies and displaying faces of your Facebook friends who are already members of the service.
• Recommendations: This plug-in allows site developers to personalize recommendations for the user based on what friends and everyone else is Liking on the site. This plug-in is intended to drive users to other pages on the site.
For more on Facebook’s plug-in plan, click here
A Personalized Recommendation Engine…
It is now simpler to integrate these plug-ins on your site-they use a seamless code that binds Facebook with your website. In addition, these plug-ins have another characteristic-they became smarter.
Publishers who use the Open Graph protocol can integrate their web pages into the social graph by identifying what an object is on a page: a book, a movie, a recording artist, an event, etc.
This changes how Facebook defines and structures knowledge for the web. For example, if I were to ‘Like’ a movie on IMDB.com, that information will be stored on my Facebook page. Now, fast-forward several months, and Facebook not only feeds that information to my Facebook page, but I now receive an additional recommendation from Facebook telling me I should follow a certain actor or actress’ page because they are also in that film.
With this new plug-in release, Facebook becomes a valuable new marketing tool to help promote content to the right targets. Now, information like our favorite books, movie, sport team, song, etc., will become permanent and more widespread on our profiles.
Users… Beware?
With these updates, users will absolutely be trading privacy for personalization. It’s clear that personalization-and ultimately more information-cannot be had without users telling a system about their interests.
More than a few people have said Facebook is becoming the new Google, with access to too much information about us.
But let’s be honest about the situation-Facebook users are not going to stop using Facebook. In fact, the ability to personalize content and the overall experience will make Facebook an even richer platform for individuals who like to create their own look and feel with content that is attached to Facebook.
Advertising is a major function of the Facebook platform, and this new “experience model” for users will likely draw further targeting. When this happens, then we’ll see how much users enjoy their privacy.
Competitors… Beware the Monster.
Facebook has a mission behind this announcement-to slowly own the web one set of eyeballs at a time. With just one plug-in, connected to a 450+ million-user base, Facebook is attempting to do more than just connect people together-but people with their things, all across the web.
Competitors don’t have much of a choice but to either innovate and build against it, or more likely embrace this technology and build on top of it.
All the big players- Google, AOL, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay-should be a bit worried about this. Facebook is literally cherry-picking social interactions all across the Web and bringing them to their platform.
(And Microsoft? They’ve already decided “why fight the power when you can join the fun,” and their idea of partnering is most likely the smartest move in their court.)
What’s Next for Facebook?
Open Graph will surely define how we consume content in the social web. Their system is smarter, more useful, better targeted, and reliably adaptable-more so than any social system previously.
As time goes on, developers and site publishers will come up with a bevy of applications and functions that will roll out in the next couple of years, depending on how Facebook allows developers to build on top of the Open Graph.
With this announcement, Facebook is just continuing to feed the beast. Not only are they biggest social network on the planet, Facebook is becoming the biggest network of people on the planet.
This blog entry is also posted on the Loomis Group Blog
