ArisRock

Last week Facebook launched Open Graph, a platform that allows sites and apps to share [Facebook] information about users in order to tailor content. Open Graph comes to compliment a series of site applications Facebook has been releasing for the past 9 months, that are all bucketed under Facebook for websites.

Facebook for websites is a suite of tools Facebook is working on, to extend their global domination outsite their domain, and into the entire web! Their key strategic areas are:

- Social plugins
- Single sign-on (FB sign-on on thousant of websites)
- Account registration data (Facebook shares your data with 3rd party sites with your permission when you login)
- Server side personalisation (FB wants to power websites personalisation engines and they will provide data through their API for this purpose)
- Analytics, Facebook will provide sites that integrate Facebook for websites / opengraph, analytics about the demographics of their audience and information about how users interact with your website.

Facebooks most known social plugin at the moment is the Facebook “like” button that will appear in places like Timeout.com, Tripadvisor, this blog and other major sites :).

Since last week 55,000 sites have integrated some kind of Open Graph functionality which represents 0.24% of the web according to http://trends.builtwith.com/

“Facebook for websites” overall has 5% web penetration, after 9 months of being in existence and Facebook like has gained 0.15% penetration within a week.

It’s important to note that 6/20 fastest growing technologies used to build the internet today belongs to Facebook.

Other trends emerging from the Social web revolution:

Personalised search

Google is also developing their own technologies to enter personalised search. They are calling it Google profile – here’s mine: http://www.google.com/profiles/arisvrakas. Google profile knows who I’m talking to on Gmail, they know my feed on Flickr, they know and index my twitter account, LinkedIn data, tripit account, blogs I write, blogs I read, and what’s my facebook profile. Google not only knows who my friends are – but they know my 2nd degree friends – aka my social circle, and they will be using this data to power personalised search and compete with Facebook.

Personalised Vertical Search

Facebook doesn’t have the technology at this stage to “organise the web”, but they can organise the people on the web, and they can compete with Google in the Personalised Search space by providing the personalisation data to Vertical Search experts (like Orbitz, Expedia, Kayak, Tripadvisor, and generally travel, automobile, but also News, Technorati, Farecast, retrevo, craiglist, Flickr, IMDB, ebay, Amazon, shopping.com, Spock, Grooveshark, Pandora and many more!

Vertical search expert sites will then be in a position to offer much better search results in their vertical with a high degree of personalisation hence increasing conversion and satisfying more customers.

The future? It’s social!

Resources:
Facebook for websites
www.mashup.com
www.cnet.com
http://trends.builtwith.com/, Friend connect trends,  Facebook for websites trends, Facebook open graph penetration
CNN technology Blog
Business Insider introducing Facebook connect
Facebook privacy concerns
Google search vs Facebook “like” analysis

Sample list of companies embracing Open Graph:
CNET, CNN.com/Forum, Joost, MyBarackObama, Red Bull, TechCrunch, TripAdvisor, Vimeo, Six Apart amongst another 55,000 sites that joined since last week.

Related posts:

1. Wolfram’s future – is it the future?
2. Google vs Facebook like – and some common sense