The importance of Facebook’s Open Graph announcement cannot be overstated.
By providing a ‘Like’ button that developers can add to any website, for any content or subject, Facebook is becoming the central hub for its users tastes and preferences.
Imagine the potential. Amazon can recommend films for you to buy based on what you’ve been looking up on IMDB, Pandora in turn can play music you’ll like based on your friends’ Amazon purchases. Suddenly the web is connected in a far more cohesive way than has ever been possible before. Some of it will be used to promote products to you but there will be a lot of scope for developers to create amazing, new, social services that feed deep into your social graph.
There’s one catch: to take advantage of all this you’ve got to be a Facebook user. It’s understandable that some users will complain about Open Graph. They only signed up for Facebook to find out what their old friends from school were doing and to poke that girl they fancy. They didn’t sign up for a service that would essentially become their passport to a whole new social layer of the web.
The fact is, though, that this is the way it’s going and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can opt out, sure, but Open Graph is so compellingly powerful that you’d be crazy to ignore it.
This is the social power of the web in action and it truly is a win-win-win situation.
- Developers win – they love it as it gives them the opportunity to tap into a whole world of user-relevant information in a way that has never been possible before.
- Facebook wins – it needs Open Graph to continue to grow and once it throws advertising into the mix (somewhere down the line it’s likely) it will be in a position to potentially usurp Google as king of the Internet hill.
- Users win as they get a whole new level of social relevance to their web experience.
There’s only one fly in the ointment: Facebook itself. That name “Open Graph” is a bit of a misnomer. With Facebook at its heart it’s not truly open and that could be its downfall. Open Graph is Facebook’s baby and Mark Zuckerberg and friends are ultimately in control of how it is used.
A truly open framework for being social on the web would ultimately be a preferable situation. It wouldn’t rely on one, commercially led, company. That said, the success of Twitter shows that users don’t care too much about truly open standards as long as they like the product and it’s just open enough to encourage an ecosystem that developers can use to create useful products with.
It’s likely that we’ll see a revisions to the way Open Graph works as a platform, but for now it’s a great first draft.
A new age is dawning, welcome to Web 3.0.
This isn't Web 3.0, it's Web 2.5. From socializing to social power, but not the “next step”. #web3
I don't think this is the be-all-and-end-all of “web 3.0″ but it's certainly the start, I believe.
Heads up! “The importance of Facebook’s Open Graph announcement cannot be underestimated.” should read “The importance of Facebook’s Open Graph announcement cannot be overstated.”
It's very cool, and pretty useful. However, just like all the social networks of the past, Facebook will eventually die away and all those like buttons will be completely useless. Facebook like all other social networks is growing and adding lots of features and soon, like Myspace, Tagworld, etc, it will become bloated and people will look for simpler things. People also just get bored of things. Ive dropped Twitter and come back to it a couple times.
Plus, Facebook IS huge, very huge. So was Myspace. Because this is proprietary it WILL die away. May take years, but will. It'd be better and more useful if a developer made something like this to be included in the base of Firefox and/or WebKit that devs could tap into. Plus itd be open.
I don't doubt that this will make experiences on the web more social, but I think it will muddle and dilute the experience people have on Facebook. Most people don't want more stuff in their Facebook feed, they want more relevant and interesting stuff. By connecting your every action on the web to Facebook, you annoy the majority of your friends with too many updates they don't care about.
Ultimately, though, this is just a play to filter ad $ through Facebook. Higher rates for hyper targeting + control of more ad impressions.
Oops! Thanks Fadeyr! Fixed.
In reality, it may now be Mark Zuckerberg and his crew, but ultimately Facebook's 400 million users will have the final say.
“we are the borg. resistance is futile. you will be assimilated.”
I think its up to o'reilly as to when we don “web 3.0″. humans are funny beings. when “likes” saturate the web, people will lose interest and the fad will pass and then those likes will become 'noise' and then annoyances. we'll see comments in the future…”omg, this site still uses FBLs! get with the times and update already.” the market has a funny way of correcting itself to prevent global dominance. see myspace, yahoo, aol, etc. huge global presences that shattered and fell to the new, smaller, and more nimble start-ups.
In some ways, this is what Microsoft Passport was supposed to do/be. And if you take a step back, we are basically recreating AOL (ie: an integrated sub-set of the Net) but on a federated model and without the monthly fees.
Social on the Web to be a truly open framework will eventually improve the situation. It does not trust, business leadership, the company is. That said, Twitter users reveal too much about open standards that do not really care as long as the success of the product they like and it just with an ecosystem that developers make useful products could use stimulate quite open
this is such a powerful tool – manufacturers can boost their online expereicne with this instead of REVIEWs, but LIKES – which would spread the word of a popular product – drive traffic back to their site :)
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Facebook’s use of Open Graph tags is a fantastic thing. I also wrote a short tutorial on using open graph tags to display your own custom video player in wall streams – If you’re interested, have a look here: http://ahrengot.com/tutorials/custom-video-player-on-facebook/.
In my example i use HTML5 fallback so the video will not only play on your desktop computer, but on iPhone’s and iPad’s – Even from inside the native facebook iPhone app. Now that’s pretty damn cool!