Today at the f8 conference 2010, Facebook made some significant announcements which give some hints to what the future of the web will be. As the Facebook CEO Mark Zukerberg says, “This will be the most transformative thing Facebook has done for the web till date.”
The three major announcements of today were:
1. Social Plugins: These are embeddable social features that can be integrated into your site with just one line of HTML. Any user who is logged into Facebook at the time will see personalized social features in your website. The user doesn’t have to be registered to your site.
This includes a Like Button, Recommendations, Login with Faces, Comments, Activity feed, Like Box, Facepile and Live Stream. In essence, these plugins let a user to socially interact with your site, view your friends activities in that site, and post your activity to Facebook – all in one single line of HTML. So simple and powerful that it may easily be overused in the web.
2. Open Graph Protocol: Using the protocol, you can integrate your webpage into a social graph. This means your website suddenly becomes an object in the social graph, and users will be able to connect to your site just like they do with Facebook Pages.
3. Open Graph API: The Open Graph can arguably be called a step towards the idea of the Semantic Web. Each social graph is a structured representation of resources like people, photo, events, pages and their relationships like friendships, likes, comments and photo tags. Each resource and its relationship is an object and users are easily read and write it to Facebook using a simple API.
As a result – Web suddenly social and personalized for you, wherever you go – without the end website having to do much.
The web all started out as websites that hardly talked to each other. With Web 2.0, we started seeing more interaction and mashup between sites. Today’s announcements from Facebook pushes it a step further. It carries your social graph where ever you go in the Internet. Just like Google assigned pagerank to each site, each resource in every website now has a weight associated to it based on your social graph.
Imagine going to Amazon and seeing the top books based on your Facebook’s friends. Imagine going to imdb and and getting recommendations from friends. The potential that the social graph API brings is even more exciting. Every website is suddenly personalized for you. And every website is a node in the Facebook ecosystem. With 400 million users and still aggressively growing, has Facebook just taken over the Internet?
I can’t even imagine the possibilities it has opened for Facebook as a company. Facebook Ads associated to every of those resources your social graph recommended shouldn’t be too far. Thats a totally new market space and albeit a very powerful one.
Has Facebook just open the gates of Web 3.0? Has Facebook just broken the Walls of the Web? Is this the dawn of Semantic Web?
Of course, there will be privacy (and single authority) concerns raised as the social plugins are very deceiving in nature to an average user. But unlike Google who soon got scared of crossing the privacy limits with Google Buzz, Facebook doesn’t give a damn about privacy and continues to invade privacy for its larger motives if it has to. Given the simplicity of the features and the power it gives to every small and bigger businesses, there is no doubt businesses are going to adapt it with open arms. And an average user may not see the harm in liking a page, which means the Web might just embrace the simplicity and power in exchange of some privacy one more time. This is creepy and dangerous and everything you can think of, but is going to happen. If not through Facebook, then through somebody else!
Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see if Facebook can capitalize on the opportunity it has just created. Regardless, one thing is sure. The web has just gotten Social – at least for millions for active Facebook users.
