Last week Facebook, the social media platform, took two major steps in its apparent quest for Internet domination. At its F8 developer conference last week Facebook introduced the universal “like” button as well as OpenGraph technology that leaves you seemingly always logged into the Facebook world. Exactly what this means for the future of the Internet has yet to be deciphered, but a battle seems to be brewing over privacy rights and internet browsing.
In addition to changing the tag line on the incredible popular fan pages from “become a fan” to “like” Facebook is also debuting a “like” button for the Internet. For websites and blogs where the button is implemented, users of the Facebook platform will be able to “like” or “recommend” a page to their friends.
The button on Web pages counts how many users have liked the page in addition to how many of your friends have “liked” that page.
Facebook’s “share” was the old technology that would do this, but this new button is a more streamlined method of sharing the articles you think your friends would like. This innovation is not unlike something the Internet has seen before. Much like the real-time stream introduced in March of last year which was an idea taken from Twitter, the “like” technology is an idea taken from Digg and other social news aggregate websites.
It’s hard to say whether it was Digg’s failure at launching a real-time stream that will be its eventual downfall to the social media giant, a launch that was supposed to happen six months ago, or whether Facebook would have marched onto its soil regardless of what Digg had or hadn’t launched. Digg for the moment has the upper hand as there is no easy way to see the totality of what your friends have “liked” through the new button. Likebutton.me is a third party website that takes advantage of your social stream to aggregate this content but is in no means anything official.
To “like” some content on a Webpage, you must be logged into Facebook. Once you are logged in though, your Facebook information is available to any website that asks for it, thanks to Facebook’s second new innovation, Open Graph technology.
In what has been billed as “instant personalization,” this new feature allows websites like Pandora to customize the music they play to you based on the music you have listed in your music interests. The new technology launched with three partners, Pandora, Yelp and Docs.com by Microsoft.
The whole situation is developing into as big as a privacy disaster as the launch of Google Buzz which launched in February, maybe bigger. Senators and representatives across the country have spoken out about Web privacy. Facebook is blurring the lines between what is public data and private data on the Web.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) has written to the Federal Trade Commission, asking them to “examine the privacy disclosures of social-networking sites to insure they are not misleading or fail to fully disclose the extent to which they share information.” The heart of Schumer’s argument is that at the moment Facebook requires users to opt out of the new feature, not opt in.
There are two sides to this. The seemingly good side, that turns vanilla websites into ones that are personalized for you and with ads that are targeted to you. And the bad side, the underbelly that works in the background, which tracks your behavior on the Web and shares your information with websites.
Both developments are putting Facebook at the center of what you do on the Web. The company, who during one week in march had more traffic than current number one (Google) in the United States, is looking to extend its virtual network to cover the entirety of what you do on the Web as well as what you do offline.