Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg announced at the f8 conference in San Francisco yesterday that the company will be working to alter the fabric of the web, to extend social networking throughout its entire make-up.
He talked about how Facebook would be building new Open Graph and Social Plugins that would allow people to “like” all kinds of items outside of Facebook’s home domain. There will also be, says Zuckerberg, auto-login capabilities that would log users in without them having to click anything, or enter any information.
The Facebook team made it clear that it believes social connections will, one day in the near future, be just as important as hyperlinks. It wants ‘social’ to be the web’s default mode. In other words, social connections, likes and dislikes, and coded interests that are machine-readable will come to define the web. For these reason, TechCrunch has written that, “Google had better watch out,” implying that Facebook could one day become bigger than the search engine giant.
According to Zuckerberg, Facebook is hoping to set up a graph the covers the entire web, or at least connect with other graphs that have already been established. “When we connect our graphs together,” said Zuckerberg, “the web is going to get a whole lot better.” Search Engine Land provides a colourful analogy on the topic: Facebook will be like the sun, and other sites will be like the planets. People’s identity would be anchored in Facebook, but through socializing with other sites, they become a part of that person’s identity, and part of the data available to other publishers and sites in the open graph. Likes would eventually become visible on people’s Facebook page.
Of course, privacy concerns will be an issue. Apparently, applications will still require permission to access people’s personal information (including “likes”, etc.), but these issues appear vague and may become even more so.
More than 75 partners are already participating in the open graph, and many more are likely to join.
Zuckerberg said that Facebook is fast approaching the 500 million member mark. He said it’s growing faster every day. The network is well-positioned to take over the internet, and becoming more and more so every day. The Facebook founder has predicted there will be over a billion “like” buttons on the internet within 24 hours after launch.
The skeptics will say that Facebook is trying to colonize the web, and the optimists will say Facebook is making the web a better place by further connecting it and making it more social. Both may be right.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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Tags: f8, facebook social web, open graph
