This article was written by Sandy Smith for Huliq.com dated April 22, 2010. Interesting and exciting, indeed for Facebook users all over the world! Enjoy!
Facebook seeks to organize your online life
You may regard Facebook as your favorite waste of time -- a place to chat with friends, share photos and links, and play Farmville till the cows come home. Facebook's creators see it as something bigger - and completely different: the organizer of your online life. Today, they've taken a giant step in that direction.
Facebook calls its vision "the Social Graph" -- a sort of map of the world that shows how everyone in it is interconnected and where they are at the time. The basic building block of this graph is a new Facebook developer framework called Open Graph. Web content providers who use it can access the information Facebook has about its members to create sections organized around members' interests. For instance, a Facebook member who calls up a business review on Yelp would see a section showing what their Facebook friends said about it and other information about their activity on the site. Another Open Graph feature -- the "Like" button -- allows Facebookers visiting some other Web site to instantly communicate their preferences not only with Facebook, but with all their Facebook friends currently on the site, and their friends too
It's a great leap forward -- and as scary as it is exciting.
Writing in Newsweek's "Tectonic Shifts" blog, Barnett Sheridan suggests that "Facebook's play to take over the entire Internet" is the realization of the long-dreamed of "Web 3.0, a smarter Internet that understands the difference between objects, people, places, animals, etc." With this capability, Web surfing would become personal -- and interpersonal -- in a way it has never been before.
It would also mean that the whole world would have access to personal information about you in a way it hasn't had before -- and that Facebook would be the custodian and gatekeeper of that information. That already makes some privacy advocates nervous, and while some privacy-watchers argue that with a little education, Facebook could avoid stirring up a privacy hornet's nest, the possibility remains that the Social Graph project could get derailed over that matter.
For now, visitors to Yelp, Microsoft Docs and Pandora can see a glimpse of the fully socially networked future, and more partners are sure to follow these three down that path.
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