Can Facebook Lead The Social Web?
Let’s face it, the entire web is becoming social. By the end of 2009, all sites will have some social component to them–and why not?
- Where there is content, there can be conversation
- When there is conversation, there is engagement
- Most great live presenters ask questions of their audience. They generally don’t do so because they want to know the answer, they do so to keep the audience on their toes
- When there is engagement, there is the potential for increased ad revenue (this is not always the case, but creative sales planners can, more easily, find ways to monetize content when users are engaged)
The questions then becomes, who will lead the charge in making the entire web truly social-
- Perhaps it will be a current social network that makes it capabilities extensible and lends its audience/tools to content providers
- Perhaps it will be new/open standards that drive the social web
- The last, least desirable option would be for every content provider to provide their own, proprietary social tool
Over the next few weeks Facebook Connect will be expanding to various content sites, making them more social. In the short term I think that this will be great. I think that new life with be injected into the partner sites. In the long term I worry about the fact that Facebook does not adhere to web standards, their platform is not truly open, and all of my data lives on the Facebook servers, with no way to get it out. This could be an issue.
On the other hand, Google is setting up a set of open standards that takes on these concerns. It will be interesting to see what happens first; will Open Social win the battle, or will Facebook open up more?
I can’t wait to find out! What do you think will happen first?
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Tags: Content Management, Conversation, Discovery Channel, facebook, Facebook Connect, Lead, MySpace, Open standard, Sales, Site Management, social networking, Social web
Dec 03, 2008
I agree that the web is becoming entirely social. For a while, I thought that a facebook style social network would make that happen. Now, I am starting to think that it will be Twitter.
The purpose of facebook, at least for me, has become to connect and monitor via the news feed. I rarely use facebook to have conversations. In fact, messages in my facebook email box usually go unanswered for weeks. I find that the facebook newsfeed has allowed me to passively follow the lives of people in my social graph. Passive = little to no conversation.
The purpose of Twitter, on the other hand, is to communicate. With communication in its DNA, conversation and engagement are a natural byproduct. I use twitter far more often to converse than facebook. Perhaps what I love the most about twitter is that it allows me to have conversations with people outside of my social graph. Powerful stuff.
Dec 03, 2008
The question is, do you think it can be a walled garden, housing all of our data that leads the social web?
i.e. You have all of your data in Facebook, sites across the web adopt facebook to make their sites more social as opposed to creating their own tools.
Dec 03, 2008
The Web itself will become more social spear headed by Facebook, but no, Facebook will not be walled, nor the place to be. They (and we) are laying the roads is all. Someday we will all have a chip in our brains to ID and photograph and “tag” people, organizing all of humanity and our histories into a social network. But that’s, um, in Beta to say the least.