Friday, April 23, 2010

Facebook Set To Revolutionize The Internet

The "Open Graph"

Facebook recently announced the launch of new “social plug-ins” at the f8 conference that will revolutionize the internet and how people are connected to it. Mark Zuckerberg talked about how Facebook intends to connect parts of the Web that other social sites are building, as part of what he described as the "Open Graph." People are increasingly discovering information not just through links to web pages but also from the people and things they care about and through their experiences. Facebook has always been focused on mapping out the part of the graph around people and their relationships. On the other hand, other sites and services have been mapping out other parts of the graph so users can get relevant information about different types of things.

Imagine this: Yelp maps out the content based on businesses and services while Pandora maps out which songs are related to each other. Facebook now helps bring your friends from Facebook to share experiences on these sites or personalize them to you. So if say you liked a song you heard on Pandora, or say you liked a service that aided you on Yelp, you can now tell your friends on Facebook about it by simply clicking on the “like” button on the site and it will appear to your friends as part of your “News Feed”.

With the new social plug-ins, brands would now be able to gauge how well their products and services are doing in terms of public reaction to the number of “likes” or “recommends”. One sample implementation is on CNN.com, where you can see which of your friends “liked” which article from the site.

CNN.com now includes Facebook's Open Graph

Noticed the “Friend’s Activity” section highlighted? Those are actually people I know from my Facebook friend list who have “liked” certain articles within CNN.com. This serves as some sort of “recommender” to people on what to read or what to do, assuming it’s their first time to a particular website. Zuckerberg himself mentioned that the new changes announced constituted "the most transformative thing we've ever done for the web." …well how true indeed. 

For more information:
Mark Zuckerberg during f8 Live
Available Facebook “Social Plug-ins”

No comments:

Post a Comment