World Domination. We like.

April 24th, 2010 • 6 comments Business, Social, Tech, Tools, Trends
Tags: Business, Facebook, Future, I like, Open Graph, Philosophy, Social Graph, Social Networks, Strategy, Tech, Tools, Trends, World

With about 420 million active users (more than 50% of them logging in every day) Facebook really is a James Bond villain’s dream come true. And no, it is not just successful. Facebook is killing it’s competitors. It has simply buried Myspace, Orkut and others and won’t stop growing. I don’t know what is going to be the No 1 social network 2020. But currently I bet it still might be Facebook.

What was once google, is – in parts – about to become our favourite Evil Empire. google may still rule everything Pull but Zuckerberg works hard to turn its business into a Push Superpower. If you search for the Large Hadron Collider you choose google. But Facebook is your choice for the restaurant around the corner and your fave sneaker brand. And since wednesday things are on the move again…

One Graph to Rule them all

In case you haven’t heard the term Social Graph before – it will either become important or obsolete in the future – simply because Facebook wants to own or dominate it. In his 2007 article ‘Thoughts on the Social Graph‘ Brad Fitzpatrick talked about the Social Graph as ‘the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related‘. Basically it is the people you know, the stuff you listen to, read, tweet, and tag, and what you put on maps – and the question how you access and distribute the information to your friends. By now there wasn’t one but many disperse social graphs. But the more we are intertwined on Facebook as the one connector, the better the platform’s chances to become the knot of earth’s social graph. Now, after some technical adjustments last week Facebook is de facto trying to nothing less than that.

Well, world domination looks a little bit different, I have to admit. Mark Zuckerberg’s tools for world domination are so unobrusive that nobody understand them who is not part of the industry. What Facebook delivered on its F8 conference looked…well…small…but may have more than significant outcomes.

• Cornerstone of Facebook’s conquest is the Open Graph Protocol -  basically a techn0logical extension of the social network that treats the free web (the artist formerly known as Not Facebook) as Facebook entities.
• This can be studied through Facebook’s well known ‘I like’ button (plus many more new social plugins) which is now available for every web page (look up). Facebook will treat blog posts (which are part of the system) just like Facebook posts – and of course draws data from them.
• Facebook Fanpages and ‘Fans’ do not exist anymore, get replaced by ‘I like’
• Facebook Connect as a quasi-brand will be dumped
• And a couple of other revisions. Facebook did not go too much into details but it will soon finish off all other competitors in the economy by offering its own currency and geo-location solutions.

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