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Facebook just shook the tech world by announcing several major initiatives that collectively constitute an aggressive move to weave the social net on top of the existing Web.The rumors were that the leading social network would launch a “Like” button for the entire Web. Instead, Zuckerberg & Co. unveiled a bold and visionary new platform that cannot be ignored. The bits of this platform bring together the visions of a social, personalized and semantic Web that have been discussed since del.icio.us pioneered Web 2.0 back in 2004. Facebook’s vision is both minimalistic and encompassing – but its ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web. Sponsor Whether we like it (pun intended) or not, we have to understand what this move means. It impacts users, publishers, competitors and, of course, Facebook itself. In this post, we summarize what Facebook announced and ponder the impact this will have on everyone. Facebook Open Graph: Publisher Plugins The Open Graph is a set combination of publisher plugins, semantic markup and a developer API. “This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of user’s tastes.” Login with Faces & Facepile : The simpler publisher plugins enhance Facebook Connect. They makes it easy and compelling to sign in by leveraging Facebook cookies and showing faces of Facebook friends who are already members of the service. Like Button and Like Box : These plugins add the liking feature to any content, typically the whole page. Both can be enhanced with semantic markup, described below. But the very basic intent for these is to get users to Like on the site and post a link to Facebook, which is then permanently stored on a user’s profile and points back to the original site. Activity Feed and Live Stream : These plugins show static and dynamic activity on the site. Activity Feed lists recent likes and comments from the site, while Live Stream shows a real-time view of activity on the site and is intended for interactive events. Recommendations : This plugin surfaces personalized recommendations for the user based on what friends and everyone else is liking on the site. It is intended to drive the users to other pages on the site. Facebook Open Graph: Semantic Markup Facebook announced simple, RDF-based markup to make the plugins smarter. In a nutshell, the markup enables publishers to say what object is on the page – a movie, a book, a recording artist, an event, a sports team, etc. This automatically enables semantics, that is, an understanding that the user is not just interacting with a webpage, but that he or she is liking a specific kind of thing. Semantics then leads to bucketing of the objects into categories like books, movies, music, etc., and gives rise to all sort of applications, including personalized recommendations. Perhaps even more importantly, the markup helps Facebook connect the users across common interests across different websites. For example, if both Pandora and Last.fm annotate a page about The Beatles using Facebook’s markup, then users will be able to see their friends, who like the Beatles across different sites. This is very significant, because the data around friends is sparse and scattered around the sites. Previously, Facebook would surface this data in the stream without persisting it. Now, the information about a friend’s likes of movies, music, books, recording artists, events, sports team, etc. will be permanent on Facebook profiles and readily available in context around the Web. Facebook Open Graph: New API The new Facebook API is elegant and streamlined. It makes it easy to access user information (with permission of course) such as profile, friends, etc. All of the calls are REST based and return JSON objects. For example, my profile information can be fetched like this: http://graph.facebook.com/alexiskold. The authentication is based on OAuth 2.0 protocol and makes it simple not only to connect, but to also prompt for permissions to access user information. This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of users’ tastes. And not just one user – all Facebook users . Implications for the Users With this release, Facebook asks users if they are willing to trade off privacy for personalization. To be clear, no personalization is ever possible without users telling a system about their tastes. What Facebook is asking for is necessary in order to then create personalized Web experience. Whether users want this sort of thing is a different question, but assuming that you want to know more about your friends you will. Friends’ interests around entertainment, sports, travel, etc. will be categorized and available. It will be easy to figure out what your friends are into both on Facebook and around the Web. In addition, Facebook is going to be using its own engine to bring you recommendations for related content. This will further accelerate the discovery and cross linking between friends. This will likely further impact the amount of search people do around the Web. As Fred Wilson pointed out – passed links replace search. Yet, the crux of user implications is neither of the above, but one single issue: privacy . It is unclear at this point that this issue is a concern for actual Facebook users, but it is clear that tech world is raising its eyebrows: Marshall Kirkpatrick , Dave Winer , Jeff Jarvis and many others expressed their concerns. People are saying that not only Facebook will know too much about us (because Google is already there today), but that it will be able to control too much. Personally, I am skeptical that the average Facebook user is going to care all that much. People are notoriously naive about being watched on the Web, and this is likely to be no exception. More likely than not, Facebook users will enjoy the personalization aspects of the new platform and won’t think much about it – until Facebook starts openly targeting them. This was not been part of f8 of course, but Facebook is likely to use the information for targeting. After all, advertising is a major part of its monetization already so why won’t it make it even better? If this targeting is too spot on, lots of users will probably get annoyed. Facebook is likely to sooth them via Facebook credits and heavy discounts, negotiated because of their massive volume. How exactly users react remains to be seen, but they will probably like the new Facebook more because of increased relevancy and interaction with friends around the Web. Next page: Implications for Publishers Implications for Publishers On the surface, this Facebook offering is a no-brainer for publishers. Who does not want more social activity on their site? However, in reality this is far from a slam dunk. To understand why, consider two types of sites: sites that are either social networks or have social networking integrated, and the sites that have their own commenting and ratings systems. In the first camp you will find Last.fm, Flixster, Goodreads, etc. None of these sites were a launch partner, understandably so. Social connections around music, movies and books are their bread and butter as are the ratings, reviews and recommendations. If they switch to Facebook for all of this, what do they have left? So any site that already has social networking built in has to decide to abandon that before jumping into the Facebook Open Graph. The even worse problem is the ownership of ratings and comments. Are publishers really ready to give that up? Nobody seriously thinks that users are going to be rating through Facebook and then through the site again. So how is this going to work? It is unclear at this point, but it’s likely publishers will ask for ways to replicate or export comments and likes that users sent to Facebook via their site. Perhaps an open API that allows publishers to manipulate the data is the answer, but it is easy to see how some publishers would be very concerned. “You don’t need to look too closely to see that Facebook is creating a feedback loop, which includes it, users and the rest of the Web and excludes its competitors.” However, if you run a website like eCommerce or a blog or a service like Pandora that currently does not have a lot of social built-in, this offering is a no-brainer as it will instantly start recycling your pages through the massive Facebook power of passed links. Implications for Competitors This is aggressive and brilliant move by Facebook – and Twitter, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, eBay, Amazon and others, except for Microsoft, should be really worried. It appears that Microsoft is content with just partnering with Facebook, perhaps rightly so. Possibly a Bing deal is in the works, which would make a lot of sense. For all other players on the Web, the worry is that Facebook is trying to close the loop in exclusively owning user eyeballs. Apparently Facebook is not content with just connecting people; it wants to connect people and things. And not only that, it wants to do it around the Web. And not just any people – friends. You don’t need to look too closely to see that Facebook is creating a feedback loop, which includes it, users and the rest of the Web and excludes its competitors. There are several things that other big players might try to do, the worst of which is to try to mimic Facebook. The “me too” that we’ve seen way too many times recently has not worked, and will not work now. The second best choice is to try to block it. As strange as it sounds it might just work. Between publisher and user issues there are a lot of concerns, and a carefully orchestrated and coordinated campaign may seriously hurt this initiative. Remember, Beacon was brought down fairly quickly by a combination of user backlash and derogatory press. The third option – to embrace and extend this platform, to innovate on top of it – is likely to be the best move. Innovation has always trumped stagnation on the Web. The problem is that it might not be that easy to embrace this initiative. After all, it does not look like Facebook asked everyone to gather around the table and cooperate on this. It might not be open to cooperation, but if it is then this is the way forward. Technically speaking, what Facebook has done is elegant and correct. From markup, to plugins, to API, all of it is modern and awesome. The missing bit is that Facebook appears to be the only repository of data in this equation – and that makes the whole offering seriously closed. Publishers and users don’t have a choice as to where to store the data. It is going to Facebook and Facebook alone. Perhaps there is a way to rework the system in a way that fixes that. We will look forward to see how this unfolds. Implications for Facebook Clearly this announcement is yet another turning point for Facebook. Before the conference Facebook was the biggest social network on the planet. If its vision actually happens, Facebook will be the biggest network of people and things on the planet- or to put it differently, it will be the taste graph of the planet. Obviously there is a different technology that Facebook will need to be building. It already perfected the social networking part, but semantic analysis, recommendation systems, vertical categories like movies and books, as well as having completely open read/write storage of tastes is completely new to the team. The biggest challenge that Facebook will face is to inject, re-deliver and most importantly make use of the data that is flowing into it. Facebook will be doing some serious number crunching and UI revamps to prepare for this next phase of its life. But perhaps the biggest experiment and test will be delivering relevancy. Google succeed with this in search; Facebook will now have the challenge to bring relevancy to the recommendations and taste-based advertising arena. Next page: Implications For the Semantic Web Implications For the Semantic Web One of the most exciting parts of the Facebook announcement to me personally is the possible breakthrough in semanticizing the Web. We’ve written previously about the Semantic Web here , and it has been a personal passion of mine. What Facebook has done has a chance to make vast parts of the consumer Web including movies, books, music, events, sports, and news semantically tagged. Publishers and websites finally have a strong incentive to mark things up and get return traffic from Facebook. “This is a great chance for the Semantic Web to finally hit consumer verticals and become real.” The actual protocol that Facebook suggested is very simple. To describe the object on the page, the site owner needs to specify the title, type of the object, image, url and the name of the site using simple meta tags. The format is extensible and additional tags can be added. For example, for a book a site can add an isbn number. This format leaves room for ambiguity. The goal of classic semantic markups traditionally has been to refer to entities precisely; for example adding the director to a movie, or a year to remakes. The Facebook protocol does not seem to have this. There were lots of previous efforts to markup the Web. To name a few, RDF , microformats , Google Rich Snippets , Yahoo’s Search Monkey (based on RDF and microformats), and lastly, abmeta , which was developed by me with help from Peter Mika at Yahoo. Of all these formats, Facebook’s is most similar to abmeta because the markup is placed into meta tags, and is simple and human readable. This simplicity is the key to broad adoption. So all around, this is a great chance for the Semantic Web to finally hit consumer verticals and become real. Implications for Developers Every new rich platform that has been rolled out in the past couple of years presented a big opportunity for developers and this one will be no exception. While we do not know exactly what sort of applications will be build on top of new Facebook, we know that they will be very powerful. This platform has the potential to give rise to to new kind of personalization and attention economy that people have been talking about for years. It has of course, a chance to majorly backfire, but I am optimistic. This will be a gold rush for application that is likely to last for at least a year, like the last one did. It’s too early to tell whether this will be a platform that survives and does not hurt is participants. However, it is very likely that the best applications built on this platform will be owned by Facebook. Still, there is a huge new opportunity here for developers and the sky is the limit. Checkmate? Facebook made a major chess move. It might have checkmated its competitors, or perhaps it might have to lose another piece like it lost Beacon. Whichever is the case, right now there are deep implications for Facebook and its competitors, publishers, users and the Web at large. What Facebook has announced cannot be ignored and can not be undone. Everyone needs to figure out the next steps and understand what to do. Time will tell where we land, but my gut is that positive things will come out of this. If nothing else, let’s give Facebook credit for innovation and re-imagination the Web. Discuss
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Facebook Open Graph: The Definitive Guide For Publishers, Users and Competitors
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Facebook appears to be preparing to launch a recommendation service that will be used on sites around the web. On the day before the F8 developers’ conference, independent developer Jesse Stay has posted code found on Facebook’s GitHub open source code repository account. Facebook is already very practiced at offering recommendations on-site: its News Feed technology pulls the items out of its Live Feed based on who and what you’ve shown is most important to you among all your friends and their activities. Facebook knows more about you than probably any other consumer service online, probably more even than Google. Recommendation could in fact become bigger than search, and so this feature could become one of Facebook’s biggest moves. Sponsor Stay believes the feature will function like Google SideWiki , the sidebar of running commentary about a page that website owners have no control over but that hasn’t really caught on with users, either. Two things you can be sure of: Facebook recommendations will make use of a website visitor’s Facebook friend connections and the feature will almost definitely make publishers happier than the uncontrollable Google SideWiki did. recommendations site=”abc.com” height=”300″ width=”400″ /> should be replaced by an iframe showing recommendations for the abc website (pending checkin on the server side). Recommendation would be huge for Facebook. Beyond just being cool for users, recommendation is compelling for site publishers because it’s like pre-emptive search. The language in that code implies to me that the feature will display content recommended to a user because of interest by friends in certain content on the site. Presumably if any of your friends have shared links to the site you’re visiting, you’ll be encouraged to visit those pages in particular. Perhaps recommendation will go further than that. It’s really hard to know, but we’ll probably find out tomorrow. That’s the question: is this a way for you to recommend content or to have content recommended to you? If it’s primarily one, I’m guessing it’s the latter. Make no mistake: recommendation could be a huge addition to Facebook’s arsenal. Recommendation technologies are something we’ve covered for years here at ReadWriteWeb . We asked a year ago if Facebook was secretly working on a recommendation technology , though the feature we saw then turned out to be something else. Beyond just being cool for users, recommendation is compelling for site publishers because it’s like pre-emptive search. Everyone wants to give their site owners an opportunity to search for the content they want to find, but even better is prompting them with what’s effectively personalized search results as soon as they land on a page. Opt-out/opt-in? This essential question of privacy will be put to the test in many ways, as Facebook continues to extend its system of identity across the web. Facebook knows enough about you, your interests, your friends, their interests, their friends and their interests too that it should be able to nail recommendations fairly well. Discuss
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Facebook May Launch Recommendation Service For Other Websites
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The current generation of check-in based location apps like Foursquare and Gowalla are more or less focused on the gaming aspects of location-based social networking. CauseWorld for the iPhone and Android, however, wants to use location based check-ins for two things: connect you to the stores around you and allow you to use the points you get for checking in to support a variety of charitable causes . CauseWorld features badges and other virtual rewards, but the main focus of the app is on collecting “karma points” that can then be exchanged for donations to participating charities. Sponsor Shopping and Charity The mission of CauseWorld’s parent company Shopkick is to bring the physical and virtual worlds of retail together. Besides just checking in at various stores, CauseWorld’s users can also scan products in supermarkets to get extra points. Typically, it’s been hard for barcode scanners like RedLaser to get to this data for grocery items, but as Shopkick’s CEO Cyriac Roeding tols us yesterday, his company manged to strike a deal with Procter & Gamble and Kraft Foods, which gives Shopkick access to this data. It’s easy to see why these companies would be interesting in making the deal with CauseWorld. After all, whenever you scan a product (even if your motivation is to help the world by gathering karma points), you are already holding this product in your hands and Kraft can now give you a mobile coupon for the product that you can use at the check-out counter. That, as Roeding put it, “is the holy grail for retailers” – being able to create a deeper relationship with the consumer right in the store while they are already looking at the product. After just a little bit more than three month on the market, CauseWorld has already seen 400,000 downloads of its mobile app and plans to release a major update in the summer. So far, the company has received around $700,000 in sponsorship money from Citi for its charity program and is giving away about $100,000 per month. Features The app itself is pretty straightforward. You can check in to stores around you and if this is a participating store, the app will also encourage you to check the store out and scan some products. To make sure that you are not just gaming the system, CauseWorld restricts you to 10 check-ins a day and enforces a three minute break between check-ins. Every check-in is worth 5 karma points (some sponsors also offer double points). You can connect the app to Facebook, but the social networking aspects are really not the focus of the app. One problem we noticed, however, is that the app allows to check in even if the store is still almost mile half a mile away from you. This seems to defeat the purpose of really connecting consumers to nearby stores and makes it rather easy to collect points while you are actually still sitting in your living room. Discuss
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CauseWorld: Checking in for Charity
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Google and 45 other organizations have sent a public letter to President Barack Obama calling for federal support for technology and education that would give consumers access to information about their energy consumption and give companies the ability to build applications on top of that information. Google, AT&T, General Electric, Intel, The Climate Group and the Natural Resources Defense Council and others will hold an event tomorrow titled ” Power in Numbers: Unleashing Innovation in Home Energy Use .” Sponsor “By giving people the ability to monitor and manage their energy consumption, for instance, via their computers, phones or other devices,” the group wrote in its letter to the President, “we can unleash the forces of innovation in homes and businesses.” Substantial challenges stand in the way of widespread smart-grid innovation. We highlighted a write-up by green tech reporter Katie Fehrenbacher last year that discussed the foot dragging going on in the world of local utility providers. ( Why Smart Grids Could Be Slow to Beat Web 2.0 ) Fehrenbacher argued that utility companies don’t get it, are afraid of the costs, and are thus unlikely to offer the kind of “real time” data delivery that could serve as a foundation for eye-opening innovation like we’ve seen from the networked world of the Internet. Fehrenbacher wrote last year. Many people (myself included) have painted a picture of how the consumer piece of the smart grid could develop into a real-time, two-way communication network that looks a lot like the Internet. In that world, consumers would be able to see variable pricing change in real time, while smart meters and energy management devices read and visualize energy consumption data every second, leading to changes in consumer behavior. The ultimate vision of that landscape is that real-time energy data unleashes innovations and applications that we haven’t yet thought of, which will deliver substantial behavior changes. Well, that’s the outcome for which entrepreneurs and innovators are hoping. The reality is that the consumer piece of the smart grid will look very different for many years to come. Perhaps a large coalition of organizations can prompt meaningful government support that will engage with these and other obstacles to energy data innovation. Discuss
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Google Asks Obama to Support Home Energy App Platform
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Video platform provider Brightcove just announced the launch of a new tool for website publishers called the “Brightcove Experience Framework for HTML5.” The framework allows the company’s 1,300 customers create HTML5-compatible websites for delivering video content to Apple mobile devices, including the upcoming slate computer known as the iPad, as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch. There has been a lot of debate about the move to HTML5 for Web video support, an area previously dominated by Adobe Flash and its accompanying Web browser plugin. Some publishers claim making the switch is a burden while others, most notably Apple CEO Steve Jobs, say the move is “trivial.” The truth, says Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire, is that “it depends.” For some publishers using homegrown video solutions, building a new HTML5 website is indeed hard work, but for customers using platform solutions (like his, of course), the transition is much easier. Sponsor Flash and HTML5 Will Coexist, Says Allaire “Transition” might be the wrong word for describing the launch of HTML5-enabled websites like those said to be coming from NPR, the Wall St. Journal , and apparently, CBS . Companies aren’t just creating a new HTML5 website and discarding the older version – they’re creating a second website to complement the first. And both websites will run side-by-side for years, says Allaire. He, of anyone, should know. Now the CEO and founder of Brightcove, Allaire’s background includes a stint at Macromedia as the company’s CTO prior to its acquisition by Adobe. While there, he actually helped build the original Flash platform. Brightcove Aims to Close Gap Between Flash, HTML5 Feature Sets The device driving the adoption of the upcoming Web standard known as HTML5, the core markup language used to create the pages of the World Wide Web, is the Apple iPad. Like its smaller mobile siblings, the iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad won’t support the Adobe Flash plugin. Flash has long been a staple on the Web for things like video content, online ads and even casual games, but for various technological and political reasons, Apple does not support it on its mobile devices. According to Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs, this isn’t an issue, since creating websites using HTML5 technology is “trivial.” To some extent, that’s an accurate statement. Allaire confirms that at its most basic form, preparing a video and putting it on a webpage using HTML5 is not a difficult process. The problem is that video publishers have come to expect more than just a simple video player like that what’s offered via HTML5 in its current state. They’re used to options like branded players, analytics, social media integrations, advanced player controls and other currently Flash-only options supported by Adobe’s technology. Brightcove , however, aims to catch up with Adobe’s feature set over the course of the year. At launch time, its HTML5 video player will support basic playback, auto device detection and H.264 encoding. In three months, more features will be added including “robust templates” to replace the basic ones available now, viewership reporting, advertising and more. And by the close of 2010, the company will offer publishers complete analytics, advertising and engagement features. However, even when HTML5 video players reach a place where they’re on par with what Adobe Flash can do, it will be years before publishers can discard their Flash-based websites. According to Allaire, the issue is that the percentage of Web browsers that support HTML5 is “tiny,” and those that do so haven’t yet settled on one video codec as the default. Until there’s uniformity in the implementation of HTML5 video, publishers who need to reach 100% of their Web audience will offer multiple versions of their websites, dependent on what device, browser and operating system is in use by their website visitors. The HTML5 Transition: A Burden on Publishers? There is a lot of debate as to the burden created by the transition to HTML5 by media publishers. Some argue that the move is not difficult, time-consuming or expensive – and anyone claiming otherwise is spreading “FUD,” (aka “fear, uncertainty and doubt”), a term used by tech geeks to deride these types of complaints as being non-substantive. Even Apple CEO Steve Jobs, reportedly trivialized publishers’ concerns using, in fact, that very word ( “trivial”) ) when demonstrating the iPad to Wall St. Journal staff earlier this year. On the flip side, others, including a number of media publishers who recently complained to Silicon Alley gossip and news site Gawker, say the argument has merit. Where does Brightcove , then, stand on this issue? Allaire says that it depends on the video platform the Web publishers in question currently use. If they’re on Brightcove or a similar platform solution, creating sites with HTML5 video content is a “publish once” process. However, those who have developed homegrown video publishing systems over the years will face more challenges. Lest you think this group includes just small-time players, Allaire rattled off a number of big names who do just that, including Disney, ABC, CBS, Yahoo and MSN. HTML5 Solutions Abound Allaire can’t say how many of the company’s 1,300 customers are planning their own iPad-ready sites since the tool was only made available to its publishers today. (Time and the NYT were the only publishers involved in the pre-release tests.) However, he can confirm that there is high demand from the company’s customers, even saying that “almost all of the consumer-facing brands,” specifically news magazines and TV brands, wanted a tool like this in order to create iPad-ready sites. Brightcove isn’t the only company to meet this growing need, either. Competitor Ooyala beat Brightcove to the punch in terms of being the first to announce iPad integration with its video platform, but Allaire said he can’t compare their offering to his because the announcement on their end was “too vague.” Outside of video platform solutions, projects like Jilion’s Sublime Video will also allow publishers to create HTML5 video experiences while falling back to Flash for unsupported Web browsers. However, this solution doesn’t – as least for now – offer all the features Brightcove says it will have in place by year-end. When the iPad launches April 3, there will undoubtedly be a number of HTML5-ready websites ready for the new computing platform. But those that don’t offer the same won’t be in any immediate trouble for their decision (except for perhaps receiving a bit of bad press). Although the iPad is expected to land in the hands of a solid million or so users by the end of the first quarter, that pales in comparison to the 500 million broadband PC users who visit sites on a desktop-based Web. That being said, there’s no doubt that Apple’s choice to forgo Flash will impact the Web and the Web publishing industry for years to come. Disclosure: The New York Times syndicates ReadWriteWeb content. Discuss
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