Imagine for a moment an internet personalized for you. At the f8 conference this past week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, announced the new Facebook Open Graph platform which will bring us one step closer to that personalized internet.
Facebook connect is a thing of the past. While connect was successful, Facebook Open Graph is predicted to destroy that success with an estimated 1 Billion like buttons added to sites in the first 24 hours (unclear if they hit their goal, but I added it to my side bar to help the cause!).
Open Graph, is simply a way to connect all the different social circles you belong to online and share information from each of them, to give you most customized experience all over the web. There will no longer be a closed network of just Facebook, just Pandora, or Yelp, or any other network you can think of. All these networks will be sharing information with each other to give you the best and most personalized experience possible.
So whats so great about Open Graph? How will this make my online experience better?
Well for starters, from a developer standpoint, it will be significantly easier to implement to your site (I was even able to do it!). But aside from that, from the user standpoint, this new Open graph, will give you the information that you want, and that your social network is engaged in. It makes it that much easier to share information with your network.
I think this is a great thing. The internet is about getting the most relevant information as quickly as possible. The direction its been heading, with Google’s personalized search and now the Facebook Open Graph is a much more customized Internet for the user, thereby creating a much more relevant internet with the ability to share information significantly quicker.
Think about how much quicker viral campaigns will spread if all you have to do is click a button on your site showing that you like it! And from the webmasters point of view, they can get significantly more demographic data giving them a much better idea of who actually has visited their site, and who they should be marketing too.
I guess the only real concern that comes up here is the privacy issues, but Facebook has spoken about that and has said that all these cookies they leave behind are completely anonymous and the sites themselves cant see them.
But nevertheless, Gizmodo believes that that will be very short lived given that there ultimat goal is to get photos of every single person in the entire world wearing nothing but their birthday suite. 🙂