Since Facebook’s f8 event yesterday, the online community has been a-twitter (really) with everyone trying to make sense of the Facebook changes and updates. Here at Carrot Creative, we are anxious to help our clients understand all of the new opportunities these changes allow them, and we thought it would be helpful to toss our hat into helping out the public.
At its very core, Facebook has set out to make it dead-pan simple to integrate Facebook all over the web (see: CNN.com, Yelp.com). So what does that mean for the way we surf the web? A lot. Allow me to explain…
Social Plugins
Facebook has released a suite of social plugins that make it amazingly simple to add contextual and social features to your existing website. Most prominent and perhaps effective example is the new “Like” plugin. Facebook has decided to make the “Like” it’s most central property, after of course, the user. By allowing the ability to Like almost any content on the web, Facebook aims to centralize user preferences and activity by allowing all users to Like content. An interesting aspect to the new web-wide Like is that “liked” content will now be part of your profile info, therefore using user actions to drive preferences, rather then profile forms.
Here’s a quick run-through of some other Social Plugins you will no doubt be encountering in your travels:
Activity Feed – An embeddable mini-feed of recent activity for your website. User’s friends show up first, then the rest of user activity, including shares and likes.
Comments – Not new to the Facebook bag of tricks, but now much easier to implement. You can now add Facebook comments to your website or blog posts. This resembles posting to a User’s wall – with a nice checkbox to add published posts to the poster’s profile (say that five times fast).
Facepile – A really nice way to show potential users which of their friends have signed up for your website by showing a row of profile pictures.
Login with Faces – A single sign-on button. This combines a Facebook Connect like sign-in, while showing a version of Facepile to encourage engagement.
Recommendations – A nice embeddable widget that offers users recommendations on content. Signed out users see the most popular interactions with your website, while signed-in users get recommendations pulled from the interactions your friends have, allowing it to recommend content more intelligently.
The Open Graph – Get used to this term, Open Graph, because soon enough you will be hearing and seeing it all over. The Open Graph Protocol is Facebook’s attempt to create a seamless and semantic way to connect users and content all over the web. Now to a lot of people that doesn’t mean much – but soon enough you will see the impact such an ambitious protocol will have.
By connecting real-life content like celebrities, brands, products, movies (you know the stuff they have Facebook Pages for) to Facebook’s Open Graph – Facebook is able to make intelligent connections by studying user preferences and interactions. Furthermore, by promoting semantic indexing, using snazzy HTML5 style meta tags, Facebook is able to smoothly index what would normally be scattered all over the web, into clear contextual searches and relationships. The ability to add context to web content is incredibly powerful. Contextually, it’s something many companies have worked towards (see: http://getglue.com/) but with Facebook’s influence – this will have a massive impact.
What does it all mean?
Facebook has become the party everyone wants an invitation to, and they’re charging at the door. For one, it means you are going to see A LOT more of Facebook around the internet. The inherent value of Facebook’s social tools and ease of implementation makes it a great opportunity for content generators to create discussion and interaction. Of course, this doesn’t just benefit the content creators – but greatly helps Facebook’s reach around the web.
Facebook has always been able to make associations and hypertarget users through their friends, fans, and interests – but now, by positioning itself all over the web, Facebook can also make connections by the way you surf. Where Google indexes the world by what they are looking for, Facebook may soon be able to index the world once you get there (and know what your favorite band is too).
It’s a classic business model with a new-wave twist. Offer consumers something of such high value that they become evangelists, proliferate and repeat. In this man’s opinion, I can see this working towards a world-wide advertising platform. Imagine a world where ads are not only contextually accurate (see: Open Graph) but hyper-acute. It’s clear Facebook is positioning themselves with their influence and leverage to offer such unique data to the rest of the world. Who is the end user? Who are their friends? What are their interests? Where do they hang out online? These are all questions marketers strive to infer, but soon enough, Facebook will have the answers.
