Missing Link, Inc.

Mark Zuckerberg

When I first saw the video about the #Facebook #f8 developer’s conference held on April 21, 2010 I was amazed. I wanted to share this with you so I have summarized it here for you. Please leave your comments below after you read this blog post.

Wow! There are amazing changes coming down the pipes for Facebook. But even better the changes will improve our web surfing experience. It is called open graph initiative.

One of my pet peeves is going to a news site and having to sift through a bunch of articles that I really don’t give a hoot about. Wouldn’t it be nice to pull up CNN and on the home page are all of the relevant news articles that I enjoy keeping up on are right there? Facebook learned from connect that social experiences are a lot more engaging for most people. Open graph initiative is designed to use people’s social interactions to mold their user experience when visiting their favorite news or shopping site.

“The power of the open graph helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken.” Imagine visiting Pandora and it would already know how to program your station. Or visiting Yelp and having it know what kind of restaurants to display to you first. As a consumer, there are potentially many benefits of the initiative, making many experiences you have more and more relevant the more interactions you perform.

How many people are on Facebook? In 2008 there were 100 million FaceBook users. Today there are over 400 million users and it that number is growing fast.

It took only one year  for 100 million people to use Facebook Connect on the Internet and on mobile devices. In case you are not aware of what Connect is, it is the API or programming interface that enables users to share their information with third party websites and applications. You probably use this if you’re using Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop for Twitter. Nine of the top 10 news sites use Connect. The reason Connect became so popular is for websites to validate user’s real identity while on their sites.

Policy Changes to Facebook

• Permissions-Combine all the permissions into a one step permissions for Facebook Connect
• Privacy information-It used to be you couldn’t capture and store information for more than 24 hours. Now if you are given permission you can collect & store user’s information for as long as you need. The benefit to you is a less expensive development cost because you don’t have to have programmers write special code paths or accessing the same API calls over and over each day.
• Credits-One common currency to be used throughout all Facebook applications

Open Graphs

Imagine if you mapped out every connection on the Internet that you accessed over a day, week, month or year. It would look like a tangled spider web. Facebook is working on connecting all of these dots by working with companies to share information.

Facebook’s role in mapping out the Open Graph is to connect people and build relationships. Yelp maps out the part of the graph that builds relationships with small businesses. Pandora is mapping out the part of the graph having to do with music. CNN and other news sites maps out the news.

Currently programmers have to have code hacks to push information to one site or social service. There is no way to automatically and easily connect all points in the Internet graph. Open Graph will connect all of the maps to make a better social experience.

Imagine having your favorite sushi restaurant placed into your profile or sharing your favorite movie or songs automatically. All of this information can be called upon when you access certain web sites. You could see who else saw that blockbuster movie or how many of your friends also liked that restaurant you’re looking at online. You’re already reading and influenced by reviews. We read the reviews on Amazon or Yelp. Wouldn’t those reviews be more powerful if they were people you knew that are your friends?

Bret Taylor the founder of Friendfeed which was acquired by Facebook recently talked about the challenge it took Friendfeed to convert new users to active users. They discovered this magic number is 5 connections. After Facebook launched their Connect application users who signed up via Facebook were four times more likely to become active users of the site than those who used other methods to sign up. Do you have a membership site? Maybe you should be using the Facebook connect to log in.

Three new changes to make instant socialization

Social Plugins-Ways you can provide a customized user’s experience with a simple line of code added to your site. Using the new Facebook Social Plugins you can access any news site and it will automatically pull up your favorite news story without you even logging in or telling them who you are. After seeing this in action my first reaction gave me a chill up and down my spine.

CNN Face Book Plugin

Like Button- Allows you to share and tell Facebook and your friends what content you like.

Activity streams plugin-A news feed that shows content delivered to your domain that is most relevant to your domain.

Recommendation plugin-They find the content that is most relevant to you

Login Plugin-If you use Facebook to login to your site it will show a picture of your friends that are also logged in or have joined this site. This is great social proof and will increase opt-ins to your site.

Social Bar-Shows all the plugins in one place that you can put on any web site. It docks to the bottom of the screen and integrates seamlessly into any site.

They can even use a set of meta tags placed within your site to customize the user experience. This is a semantic markup that collects information from the “like bar” and uses it to display  content on your site. Imagine going to an electronic site and reading about the new iPhone coming out this summer. You click on the “like button”, your picture pops up on the site and from that point on you are sent updates from Apple whenever news is released about the new iPhone.

30 partners that will be testing this new protocol

Facebook Open Graph Parnters

Summary

The benefits if the privacy advocates don’t interfere are big! Not only will this make Facebook a direct competitor to Google but you will start to see more targeted ads delivered to your Facebook page based on your social interaction with other brands. This is the first step to intelligence computing. If you are thinking about or have ever thought about advertising on Facebook now is the time to start looking into this. The companies who figure this out first will benefit the most and be well ahead of the competition.

Take Care,

P.S. Sign up for my market updates and I’ll let you know when you can start using these Facebook plugins on your site.