14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook wants to own the web. Specifically, Facebook wants to own your web. In fact, Facebook wants to become the web, it wants to be in every page on every site. It wants to be your news source, it wants to recommend movies or music or even people you might like, it wants to be your shopping platform, it wants to be your gaming platform, it wants to serve you ads catered to you regardless of where you are online. None of this is especially new and Facebook is certainly not the only one trying to do it, Google is battling for the very same things, it could be argued. But the difference is that Facebook may very well achieve what it has set out to do.
Whereas Google wants algorithms and computers to do the heavy lifting, trying to figure out what you like and what you need at any specific point, Facebook wants to use people for the very same things. The social network already has access to more information about you than just about any other website out there and it’s going to expand on that several times over when it will syphon data from everyone else. It’s not a matter of how, it’s a matter of when. And the answer may be ‘very soon.’
Facebook is holding its annual developers conference, f8, these couple of days. While Twitter’s own conference last week proved mildly exciting, nothing prepared us for what Facebook had in store. Though, in retrospect, most of the pieces of the puzzle were known and visible, it wasn’t until Facebook put them all together that the magnitude of what it could accomplish was obvious.
Facebook Connect, though just a little over a year old, has proven very, very successful, connecting more than 100 million people over various sites with their Facebook profiles. But Connect will be no more, the brand will be killed off in favor of the new Open Graph and its compadres, Social Plugins – the universal Like buttons we’ve heard of before – and the revamped Graph API.
The Open Graph is, in a way, an extension of Facebook Connect, technically, but its scope is much more ambitious. It will allow any site to have access to your public Facebook data in order to customize your experience on the site based on your likes, friends, interests, and so on. Everything goes on behind the scenes, but it basically means that Facebook will ‘follow’ you wherever you go.
The benefits of having all this data at any site’s disposal are obvious, developers could use it to build powerful, new functionality and make your experience better. You win, third-party sites win and Facebook wins. It sounds almost utopic.
But laws of nature dictate that we can’t all be winners. While the benefits may be great, all this comes at quite a huge cost. Both users and other sites will completely depend on Facebook. Social networking is Facebook, with reports of it closing in on 500 million users, no sign of slowing down, and no competitors in sight, the site has not only won the social-networking wars, it has become synonymous with social networking. And, for some users, it has already become synonymous with the web.
Nothing good has ever come when one entity holds this much power. And Facebook hasn’t exactly proven that it can be trusted to put the users’ interest above its own. People are worried today that Google seems to be growing too big and too powerful. Give it five years and Google may look like a harmless toddler compared to Facebook.