Well, the industry has been talking about it for some time now but last night it actually happened. Mark Zuckerberg finally made public his plans for how Facebook will turn the web social and possibly, just possibly, unseat Google as the dominant brand on the internet. Facebook, with its 400 million users worldwide, has already overtaken Google as the most visited site in the US and if their vision comes true it may completely change how we think about interacting with the web.
And what’s the best bit about all of this? Well, if you live on this side of the Atlantic, LBi was the place to watch this all unfold. Last night nearly 400 developers, entrepreneurs, marketeers and journalists from across the digital industry gathered in the basement here at LBi’s HQ at the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane to watch a live stream of Zuckerberg’s keynote speech from the Facebook F8 conference at the San Francisco Design Centre in California. And have a free beer or three.
Organised through our friends at Facebook Developer Garage, LBi’s streaming event was the official UK & Europe event for F8. From 5pm, the first people started to arrive and within an hour the basement was humming with expectation. Ten minutes late, Zuckerberg took to the stage and lights went down as we all took in the uber geek’s vision for an Open Graph on the web, putting people and meaningful relationships at the centre of the web. Our very own Chris Clarke said a few words about how happy we were to host such an important event in the evolution of digital, and we even had a live Q&A over Skype with the Director of Facebook’s Developer Network Ethan Beard, again live from San Francisco.
A good time was had by all. But what does all this really mean?
In 2008, Facebook had introduced us to the social graph which defined our presence by our connections with our friends. But this social graph exists in isolation, just as your music graph, which understands what bands you listen to and what new music you might be interested in exists in isolation on Last.FM, or your movies graph exists in isolation in IMDb keeping track of the films you like and the ones you want to see in the future.
With Facebook’s vision of the Open Graph, all these things can be connected. This new protocol will let publishers tag their content by type along with a “Like” button, basically an iframe, that partner sites put on their webpage. Without needing to login the user will be able to “Like” a particular piece of content on that site, whether that be books, films, music, clothes or a blog post. This information is then stored by Facebook on the user’s profile and the website on which the user “Liked” that content will be able to serve a personalized experience back to that user, showing which of their friends also like not just that content but any content on that site. The potential for how this can change a user’s perception of a website and its content through recommendations from friends, is self evident. Moreover where these preferences are stored on your profile, anyone can click on the link and see, say, the review of a DVD on the LoveFilm website that you “Liked” in the first place.
This means different things to different users. Publishers will be able to gain a greater understanding of how popular pieces of their content are and how it’s being shared. More significantly for most people though, and what will be scaring Google is that consumers should be able to undertake better social searches, with Facebook using the “Likes” as Google currently uses PageRank. Basically it could be your friends and the online community defining what the top search result should be, rather than an automated algorithm. Of course whether such a subjective choice is preferred by the public remains to be seen. Zuckerberg, however, is pretty confident as he told the BBC:
“We are building toward a web where the default is social, If you look back a few years ago and even as recently as today, in most cases the web isn’t designed to use your friends. They don’t assume you have a real identity but we are seeing that seep in more and more. We want to be one of the things that empowers that and right now most users are using Facebook and we hope we can be a good force in driving that forward.”
As our own Adam Russell said to me afterwards, the Open Graph is not a new idea. A web that is truly socially connected has been the dream of many for some time now. But Facebook are the first brand with the reach and technology to really make it happen. Furthermore, as Chris Clarke said in his address last night, Facebook’s principal of honest open communication and believable interactions between users chimes well with LBi’s vision of Building Believable Brands through content functionality and tools. And it’s great that Facebook is here to simplify the distribution process.
Here in Brick Lane, we saw some great demonstrations from a few of the 75 partners that Facebook are working with globally to launch this product. Introduced by Facebook’s Head of European Business Development Christian Hernandez Gallardo, Sky, LoveFilm (who bravely implemented the code just five minutes before a live demonstration!) and MyDeco all showed us how their content can be shared and integrated across the platform.
What this means for Sky’s colleagues at News International, The Times, in terms of being left behind in the social web with their content hidden behind paywalls, is a blog for another time. But certainly Rupert Murdoch’s contrary old media view of what is becoming an increasingly open and transparent web grows more archaic by the day. But another increasingly archaic brand, Microsoft, will have been lifted by the introduction of Docs, a news service from Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences Labs that allows Facebook users to discover, create & share Microsoft Office documents. All the functionality of Office for free. Better than Google Docs? You can bet that Zuckerberg is hoping that most people, already so familiar with Word and Excel, will decide that indeed it is.
The really exciting times will begin as developers start to evolve this new technology over the coming months. The fun part for the ordinary user will be to sit back and watch as the brave new world of the social web evolves around them. Whether Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin will be quite so comfortable, watching from the multi coloured bean bags at Google’s HQ in Mountview, just a few miles up the Californian highways from Facebook’s own head office in Palo Alto, is another matter.