The tech press is buzzing today with headlines which vary from the BBC’s ‘Facebook’s bid to rule the web’ to ‘Facebook spreads itself across the web’ at the NYT.
The hyperbole stems from F8 – Facebook’s developer conference held yesterday – where founder Mark Zuckerberg outlined changes to the Facebook platform. Let’s look at those main changes after the jump.
The Open Graph
This is really more of a concept than a specific change. Currently, you have disparate ways of navigating your interests on the web. Last.fm for music, IMDB for films, YouTube for videos. So these services mark your interests across the wider map of the internet, but there’s no way of connecting these separate points – until Facebook’s Open Graph. The platform will pull of these points together through ‘connections’ and is already starting to change its terminology to reflect this.
Connections and likes
For brands, this means fan pages are now ‘official pages’ no longer populated by ‘fans’, but users who ‘like’ them. But when you like a page, you’re also connecting to it. But that’s not the same as ‘liking’ a status update.
Argh!
The terminology is confusing, but really your fans are still your fans under a slightly different name and you can still communicate with them in the same way. BUT, where fan pages were relegated to the bottom of a user’s profile, they’ve now been integrated into their main interests. It’s potentially a lot easier for my friends to glance at my profile and see which pages I’ve joined by categories like Music or Movies – and then connect with that page too.
The web-wide ‘like’ button (yup…that’s another kind of like)
Here’s where Facebook are really trying to elbow out the competition. The new like button could appear, in theory, under every piece of content on every website. Zuckerberg’s own prediction was 1 billion like buttons across the web in 24 hours (no one’s worked out whether this is actually true yet). Users logged into Facebook can, for example, now like an article on the CNN website. The like button also shows which of their friends have liked the same article. This data could be used to recommend articles tailored to users based on theirs and their friends’ likes (though CNN itself won’t have access to your data…imagine the privacy outrage).
At Facebook’s beck and call?
So what do you think – where everyone was falling over themselves learning SEO techniques to rank on Google, will brands now reposition their sites to be truly ‘connectable’ on Facebook?
