Facebook – Connecting the Web ‘Socially’

At the F8 Developer Conference last week Facebook announced their plan to become the social centre of the web – At the heart of their plans is Facebook Open Graph.

Facebook Open Graph allows other websites and applications to access and share information about Facebook users in order to tailor their own offers, features and services to each one’s interests and tastes — even if that individual has never visited their site before.

If a user is signed-in to Facebook, a participating Open Graph website will display information, goods and services tailored specifically to your interests — without requiring you to sign in at that website or provide it with any information. This is because Open Graph will draw upon information from your Facebook profile.

Facebook’s vision is a ‘socially connected’ web – offering a deeper level of personalisation for users. Open Graph will be useful to businesses and services: on Facebook, users are connected to people they know, as well as public figures/services/products they “like”; Facebook’s new platform will allow participating websites and apps to share this information with each other.

Facebook have correctly identified that Open Graph will come almost naturally to many users – who never log out of their Facebook accounts when browsing the internet. Once again it raises fears about privacy and control over which websites access their Facebook profile data. My concern is that the ‘average’ Facebook user will not fully understand the implications of Open Graph and their data – most people will not take the time to customise their Privacy Settings at length.

Following the conference, this week Facebook announced that 50,000 websites had already integrated it’s new social plugins demonstrating the seriousness of Facebook’s intent on connecting everything on the web ‘socially’.