Facebook CEO Zuckerberg says the “Social Graph” is the Future of the Web
April 22, 2010 - By Justin E. Gehrke
At yesterday’s f8 Conference, in San Francisco, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, unveiled the company’s latest plans to further ingrain the depth and scope of social networking into the lives of internet users. Citing mind-numbing statistics that show Facebook as having passed the 400 million member mark, Zuckerberg explained that the company’s intention is to increase the ease with which Facebook users can share information across websites.
According to a post on Zuckerberg’s Facebook blog, the social graph is the culmination of efforts which began three years ago, with the intention of mapping the “connections between people and things they care about.” The ultimate goal of the project is to form a graph, which shows how people are interconnected around the world.
The basic idea is to add the familiar Facebook “Like” button to content posted on websites around the globe, to allow one-click sharing with other people in their “social graph” and also increase the size of their own graph by making new connections. In the process, Facebook plans to change the paradigm, by making social networking-based communication the default method for users, products, and applications.
Websites, too, could benefit from Zuckerberg’s plans, since they would be able to embed widgets that connect to Facebook, via the browsing member’s profile and inform them who among their friends expressed an interest in the content being viewed. To this end, Facebook announced that it has partnered with Yelp, Pandora, and Microsoft in order to immediately begin making this elaborate, social dream a reality.
Through connecting Yelp, a popular review site, and Pandora, an online streaming music service, users of both services will be able to share their preferences with others. While this may help others discover new places and music, it also has the potential to support Facebooks efforts to bring like-minded people together. For their part, Microsoft is slated to launch a document creation and sharing application that is based upon the Office 2010 framework and will be accessible via both Facebook and an external, yet-to-be announced website.
Facebook’s move raises the bar for other social networking platforms, such as Twitter and Google Buzz, who will be hard-pressed to come up with plans as grand as Zuckerberg’s. The complete details of the plan and future additions to the list of Facebook partners has yet to be revealed. Based on the phenomenal growth of Facebook, since its original launch in 2004, though, there is little doubt of one thing. If anyone has the potential to pull off plans to change the way the entire web works, it’s Facebook. Further details of the social graph initiative, video feeds, and other goings-on from the f8 conference can be found at f8 Live on Facebook.
Sources:
The Facebook Blog – Building the Social Web Together
Reuters – Fast-growing Facebook aims for more social Web
