image by jaycameron
Okay, so maybe Facebook won’t kill Google, but I’m predicting they will supplant them as the largest and most ubiquitous web app.
In case you’ve been sleeping, yesterday at the f8 developer conference, Facebook announced Open Graph, a new killer app.
What’s changed
If you aren’t up to speed, here are the three most important updates (and you can read the rest on Mashable):
- With the new “Facebook for Web Sites” social plugins (the like button is featured at the top of this post), you don’t need to log in to a web page to engage with its content. Try it out.
- Networks, like Yelp or IMDB, can now connect directly with your Facebook, meaning that when you look up a movie on IMDB, you can immediately see which of your friends like that movie too.
- The strict charge to app developers that “you must not store or cache any data you receive from us for more than 24 hours” has been removed.
From Dave McClure’s prophesy
In February Dave McClure predicted that “in 2015 the default login & payment method(s) on the web will be Facebook Connect, Google Gmail, or Apple iTunes.”
McClure’s point was that the more you use a platform, the more likely you are to remember a password, so one is likely to win out.
If Facebook, or Google, or Apple could find a way to further spread their tentacles out onto the web, they could help their partner sites reduce password friction. Need to sign into XYZ Company to buy a widget? Don’t bother creating a new account, just use Facebook (or Google or iTunes, etc.)
With Open Graph, McClure’s prediction may come sooner than 2015, and unless Google and Apple come out with their own (better) killer app soon, they’re going to be left in the dust.
After all, why have a PayPal (or Google) account if Facebook will do?
A chink in Google’s armor
Besides finding a way to make commerce easier, Facebook has also created a way to leverage Google’s weaknesses. As Jeff Jarvis pointed out in What Would Google Do?:
Google has fresh links in its database because it constantly and quickly scrapes the web to find the lastest content, but until those new entrants gather more links and clicks, it’s hard for Google’s algorithms to know what to make of them. Could this be a chink in Google’s armor?
Google is really great at counting links because computers are really good at counting. More links to a page means more credibility for the source, means higher organic search results.
But search in this way is built on scarcity—and we all know that content is not scarce on the web.
So search on the web is really just another way of showing us information we already know. It’s very utilitarian in its construction, deeming the most popular results as the most credibile and placing them at the top of the results page.
What’s missing from this process is semantic relevance of content to individuals—maybe my idea of “great indie bands” is far different from yours—and social context.
Where the Open Graph Delivers
At Social Business Edge on Monday, Adina Levin (co-founder of Social Text) argued that social sharing is mostly about context because our individual identities are created and developed in social contexts.
For example, I value ethical practice in business because I was enveloped in a social context during my undergraduate that showed me the importance of ethics. I didn’t just decide this on my own, a social context helped to create the conviction.
Facebook has now allowed us to treat every web page as a social object that may take a subordinate role to interaction. They’ve found a way to provide semantic relevance to user’s online experiences (if you are my friend, we’re more likely to share the same definition of “great indie bands”).
In other words, Facebook has found a way to make interaction more important than the content itself by introducing a social context through interaction for every Yelp review, for every Pandora station, for every Mom and Pop website.
As Adrian Chan described social objects and interaction:
the interaction situates and contextualizes the object. Not the other way around. The object doesn’t tell us what’s going on, nor does it define uses and interactions. Those belong to practices — namely, practices in which objects are used.
Facebook just made the entire web more social not only by making it easy to share, but by giving it context.
Expect your experience of the web to get exponentially better—because its meaning will become oriented around you and your social connections.
This is good for business, too
Of course, we can’t forget the money.
All of that context means that retailers can
…imagine being able to pull a customer’s profile data [including their interaction history with your site] when they visit your website. Then imagine that customer comes into your store and purchases something. You could make them a point of sale offer based on their profile data that you collected when they visited your site earlier that day. Mind blowing.
UPDATE: A word on Facebook’s AdWord Killer
In the same way that search results are based on counting and analysis of words in text, Google’s system of contextual ads is based on nearby keywords.
Imagine though, targeted ads based not only on keywords in text, but also on your past historical interaction (what you’ve “liked”) as well as your friend’s interaction (what they’ve collecteively “liked”).
Enter a new era of socially relevant ads across the web.
How does Google compete with that?
-Andrew
Image credit: jaycameron on Flickr. See original for copyright information.
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