Ever since Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s twenty-something CEO, announced his company’s new “Open Graph” initiatives at FB’s developer conference F8, the web has been buzzing about the potential repercussions. Some say that Facebook is aiming to make the entire web more social, whereas skeptics claim that Facebook is pursuing global digital domination.
Is Facebook trying to revolutionize the web for the good of its users?
OR
Is Facebook trying to revolutionize the web for the good of Facebook?
Before jumping into the fray, analyzing how Facebook’s expansion plans may impact the Internet, let’s review the core elements of Zuckerberg’s keynote address:
Facebook: What They Announced At F8 (via The Next Web)
1) Open Graph Protocol/Permissions
There is data outside of Facebook that the company wants to be brought in and made relevant inside of the Facebook platform.
2) Social Plugins
Not to be outdone by Twitter and their @Anywhere platform, Facebook will be rolling out new plugins to spread the Facebook love all across the internet. The Open Graph is all about bringing information into Facebook, these plugins do the opposite.
In the words of Bret Taylor, of FriendFeed fame, “Social plugins are a way you can provide an instantly personal experience with one line of HTML.” Does that sound familiar?
Among the new plugins are a tool to import an activity feed into a website, to show what a user’s friends have done on that specific website, and recommendations. The best plugin announced is a new Like button, that Facebook expects to veritably take over the internet, and give Facebook a direct look into which websites are hot, which are not, and what impact they have on Facebook.
3) Search
Continuing with the developer theme, Facebook is opening to doors on the data vault and letting people look in at everything not marked private.
Developers will be able to search all data that is public, and with the new rules on storage, they will be able to keep it for more than a day. This is going to make Facebook applications both deeper, and wider. To refrain, Facebook wants happy developers.
4) OAuth 2.0
Facebook will adopt the OAuth 2.0 authentication standard, in partnership with Yahoo and Twitter.
From Zuckerberg’s Facebook Blog Post:
This flow of social information has profound benefits – from driving better decisions to keeping in touch more easily – and we’re really proud that Facebook is part of the shift toward more social and personalized experiences everywhere online.
This next version of Facebook Platform puts people at the center of the web. It lets you shape your experiences online and make them more social. For example, if you like a band on Pandora, that information can become part of the graph so that later if you visit a concert site, the site can tell you when the band you like is coming to your area. The power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken.
Is the New Facebook a Deal With the Devil (via ReadWriteWeb):
At first blush, it’s hard from a user’s perspective to find anything to criticize Facebook for in today’s announcements. Those criticisms will no doubt start to form once people wrap their heads around all the particulars. On principal, though, there’s going to be so much more Facebook around the internet that it feels like a real cause for concern. Centralization is a dangerous thing and Facebook is a young company that’s proven willing to break its contract with users in the past (see Facebook’s Privacy Move Violates Contract With Users).
For hundreds of millions of people, Facebook already was the internet. That’s liable to be even more true in the future, thanks to the changes announced today. For all intents and purposes, when it comes to social networks, there is no other option for most people. That’s a very vulnerable place for the web to be.
Facebook is an ambitious company, with eyes on transforming the web. Robert Scoble, tech evangelist at Rackspace, wrote an excellent post on his blog that explains just how ambitious Facebook’s recent moves are. Zuckerberg and his lieutenants want to revolutionize how we experience information and content online.
While the Company is preaching the extraordinary value of open doors across the Internet, an “Open Graph” would funnel a tidal wave of behavioral data to Facebook. With these updates to its platform, FB is in a position to study everything we touch on the Internet (sound familiar?), and how that behavior relates to our social graph. You can begin to see how much more powerful Facebook is set to become.
Facebook is still a very young company. Has FB earned your trust? Do you trust that the company is making these “improvements” for the good of its users more so than itself? That’s what this all really comes down to. Making the web more social would be amazing. It would heighten the Internet’s value, and make our digital interactions more personalized. With nearly 500 million users worldwide, Facebook’s “Open Graph” push will serve to put digital identity fingerprints under the company’s control. As Scoble writes, “It’s a scary world, but one that has huge benefits.”
Facebook’s Ambition (via Scobleizer)
Today I told someone like I felt like I was at the completion of a major piece of commerce infrastructure that would affect our lives for decades. I likened it to the cross-continental railroad. Remember that? Well it changed the world. It opened the west. Made new careers possible. Let fresh food from California get to Chicago before it spoiled and all that. But it created an organization that had a LOT of power that wasn’t always used well.
Today I told Zuckerberg that he now has the modern-day railroad in his grasp and challenged him to both win our trust and not abuse the major power he’s going to aggregate.
So far I’m hearing all the right things from him and the employees around him. They know that this is a major, ambitious, move and they are going to move carefully and deliberately from here. They better or else we’ll see regulators move into control this business like we’ve never seen in our industry. One CEO, who asked not to be named, told me in the hallways today that Facebook is now a utility that the industry is going to rely on and he noted that utilities usually are heavily regulated to make sure that they don’t abuse the power they have over people and businesses.
I agree with Scoble’s assessment. Time will tell exactly how much, or how little, users will trust Facebook as the primary gatekeeper of their social profile across the web. If Facebook violates the trust of its users, and appears too capitalistic for its own good, Zuckerberg’s dream of a more social web may crumble under his own ambition.