The rumors were that the leading social network would launch a “Like" button for the entire Web. Instead, Zuckerberg & Co. unveiled a bold and visionary new platform that cannot be ignored.
The bits of this platform bring together the visions of a social, personalized and semantic Web that have been discussed since del.icio.us pioneered Web 2.0 back in 2004. Facebook's vision is both minimalistic and encompassing - but its ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web.
Whether we like it (pun intended) or not, we have to understand what this move means. It impacts users, publishers, competitors and, of course, Facebook itself. In this post, we summarize what Facebook announced and ponder the impact this will have on everyone.
Facebook Open Graph: Publisher Plugins
The Open Graph is a set combination of publisher plugins, semantic markup and a developer API.
“This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of user's tastes."Login with Faces & Facepile: The simpler publisher plugins enhance Facebook Connect. They makes it easy and compelling to sign in by leveraging Facebook cookies and showing faces of Facebook friends who are already members of the service.
Like Button and Like Box: These plugins add the liking feature to any content, typically the whole page. Both can be enhanced with semantic markup, described below. But the very basic intent for these is to get users to Like on the site and post a link to Facebook, which is then permanently stored on a user's profile and points back to the original site.
Activity Feed and Live Stream: These plugins show static and dynamic activity on the site. Activity Feed lists 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.
Recommendations: This plugin surfaces personalized recommendations for the user based on what friends and everyone else is liking on the site. It is intended to drive the users to other pages on the site.
Facebook Open Graph: Semantic Markup
Facebook announced simple, RDF-based markup to make the plugins smarter. In a nutshell, the markup enables publishers to say what object is on the page - a movie, a book, a recording artist, an event, a sports team, etc. This automatically enables semantics, that is, an understanding that the user is not just interacting with a webpage, but that he or she is liking a specific kind of thing. Semantics then leads to bucketing of the objects into categories like books, movies, music, etc., and gives rise to all sort of applications, including personalized recommendations.
Perhaps even more importantly, the markup helps Facebook connect the users across common interests across different websites. For example, if both Pandora and Last.fm annotate a page about The Beatles using Facebook's markup, then users will be able to see their friends, who like the Beatles across different sites. This is very significant, because the data around friends is sparse and scattered around the sites. Previously, Facebook would surface this data in the stream without persisting it. Now, the information about a friend's likes of movies, music, books, recording artists, events, sports team, etc. will be permanent on Facebook profiles and readily available in context around the Web.
Facebook Open Graph: New API
The new Facebook API is elegant and streamlined. It makes it easy to access user information (with permission of course) such as profile, friends, etc. All of the calls are REST based and return JSON objects. For example, my profile information can be fetched like this: http://graph.facebook.com/alexiskold. The authentication is based on OAuth 2.0 protocol and makes it simple not only to connect, but to also prompt for permissions to access user information.
This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of users' tastes. And not just one user - all Facebook users.
Implications for the Users
With this release, Facebook asks users if they are willing to trade off privacy for personalization. To be clear, no personalization is ever possible without users telling a system about their tastes. What Facebook is asking for is necessary in order to then create personalized Web experience. Whether users want this sort of thing is a different question, but assuming that you want to know more about your friends you will.
Friends' interests around entertainment, sports, travel, etc. will be categorized and available. It will be easy to figure out what your friends are into both on Facebook and around the Web. In addition, Facebook is going to be using its own engine to bring you recommendations for related content. This will further accelerate the discovery and cross linking between friends. This will likely further impact the amount of search people do around the Web. As Fred Wilson pointed out - passed links replace search.
Yet, the crux of user implications is neither of the above, but one single issue: privacy. It is unclear at this point that this issue is a concern for actual Facebook users, but it is clear that tech world is raising its eyebrows: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis and many others expressed their concerns. People are saying that not only Facebook will know too much about us (because Google is already there today), but that it will be able to control too much.
Personally, I am skeptical that the average Facebook user is going to care all that much. People are notoriously naive about being watched on the Web, and this is likely to be no exception. More likely than not, Facebook users will enjoy the personalization aspects of the new platform and won't think much about it - until Facebook starts openly targeting them.
This was not been part of f8 of course, but Facebook is likely to use the information for targeting. After all, advertising is a major part of its monetization already so why won't it make it even better? If this targeting is too spot on, lots of users will probably get annoyed. Facebook is likely to sooth them via Facebook credits and heavy discounts, negotiated because of their massive volume.
How exactly users react remains to be seen, but they will probably like the new Facebook more because of increased relevancy and interaction with friends around the Web.
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