asemanfar - a blog about programming

Today, Facebook announced their new Open Graph API. The Open Graph API allows any website to have all the features of a Facebook Page. So you'll be able to "Become a Fan" of any site, make comments, have discussions, and receive updates published by fanned sites. Think Amazon's Universal Wishlist but not just for things you can buy.

This leads to some interesting business opportunities for Facebook. Facebook will be able to capture socially relevant information from anywhere on the Internet. Facebook will collect information about "what's on your mind" from everywhere on the Web, not just on facebook.com.

Now let's take that and see how Facebook can profit from that: they can do exactly what Google does but enhanced by your social graph. They will be able to give you Web Search Results but unlike Google, they'll be able to tell you that "Joe Smith likes this" and what was "on his mind" when he visited that site. Not only that, but they'll maybe even cross some privacy boundaries that Google couldn't and use that information to target ads.

The challenges Facebook will face in the coming months/year will be dealing with privacy issues and adoption of the Open Graph API. I suspect something similar to a bookmarklet, browser toolbar, or full-blown "socially enhanced" browser will be used in order to gain traction and bootstrap their social indexing efforts. I'm also interested to see how well they'll execute on search results with social graph information and if they can complete with Google's myriad of well-tested and proven search ranking algorithms.

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