{"id":150820,"date":"2010-01-07T17:21:49","date_gmt":"2010-01-07T22:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=89790"},"modified":"2010-01-07T17:21:49","modified_gmt":"2010-01-07T22:21:49","slug":"the-dawn-of-facebook%e2%80%99s-people-organized-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/150820","title":{"rendered":"The Dawn of Facebook\u2019s People-organized Web"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>In 2010, Facebook is setting out to structure a social layer of the web, indexing web pages and objects by harnessing what its users say about them, including whether those users like them or not, and what they tag within them.<\/p>\n

Already, Facebook Connect<\/a> offers authentication services for more than 80,000 web sites, soon to include the mega-portal Yahoo<\/a>, in order to inject them with its users’ social relationships and sharing. As a broad trend, it’s clear at this point that nearly everything — even credit card transactions<\/a> — can be made social.<\/p>\n

Om and I had the chance to spend some time at Facebook this week and hear a bit more about where the company is headed this year. Here’s my analysis of what they told us.<\/p>\n

People Are the Web<\/strong><\/p>\n

Facebook’s core asset is its social graph — a diagram of people and their connections. Now that it’s successfully mapped people to one another, it wants to map their connections to the rest of the web and by extension, the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

The goal in doing so, as the folks at the company told us over and over again, is to build an understanding of Facebook users’ identity<\/strong> — what they like, what they associate themselves with, who they are. The corollary of making something social is making it personalized.<\/p>\n

Privacy concerns<\/a> notwithstanding, this wealth of information and customization can be put to a greater good. As Marc Davis, former chief scientist of Yahoo Mobile and founder of Invention Arts, said at a recent GigaOM bunker series event (see related GigaOM Pro write-up<\/a>, subscription required): “Human beings understand context from their relationships, but computers do not, so if we can use metadata to help computers understand where, when and how the metadata was created, we build better context for data.” That’s what Facebook is after. But in order to do so, the company needs to look beyond the confines of its own web service. And it is.<\/p>\n

Facebook.com: Means To an End<\/strong><\/p>\n

Facebook.com is just a web site, or as platform engineering head Mike Vernal described it, “info aggregation with a great photos app.” Now the company wants to blur the barriers between it and the rest of the web. Already, the site’s “Fan Box” widget — which allows users to become fans of a company or person from their web page — gets 15 billion impressions per month. “We want these actions to become possible wherever they’re most natural,” said Vernal. Soon, using the company’s announced open graph API<\/a>, users will be able to become a fan of any page on the Internet. The API essentially turns a regular web page into a Facebook page, giving it the ability to collect fans, publish stories to their Facebook stream, and appear in the social networking site’s search results.<\/p>\n