Belvedere Times

You Either Like Me Or You F8 Me

How Facebook Took Over The Web

Michael Stone, Editor-in-Chief

Facebook has grown in leaps and bounds since its first F8 Conference in 2007.  Since the last conference it has quadrupled its membership from 100 million to a whopping 400 million.  These F8 Conferences are growing more popular  -  they have brought us Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect.  This year they dealt a huge blow to all of their competitors when CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced Facebook Open Graph.  

Open Graph embraces a new way of living online.  The late noughties were ruled by Google when what we viewed online depended on what we searched for.  2010 marked the beginning of recommendations.  What we view online will no longer depend on what we look for, it will depend on what we are told to view.  Facebook is at the forefront of this.

The main point of Open Graph is to bring all of your online activity together into one big graph rather than many small ones.  One simple word can do this - 'Like.'  With the introduction of the Like Button, Facebook has made the web even more connected.  

Website owners can post the Like Button into their sites.  By simply 'Liking' an article you are telling Facebook, and the site, that these are the sort of things you like.  As you 'Like' more and more things Facebook can understand you more and more.  Using all of this gathered information it can begin to recommend things to you and your friends.  

Eventually you will no longer go on your computer to look up restaurants in Google, you will log on to Facebook to see what restaurants are recommended to you from your graph and your friends' graphs.  It is genius.  Within 24 hours of their release, 50,000 websites added Like Buttons, including Yelp (www.yelp.com/) IMDb (www.imdb.com) Pandora (www.pandora.com).  With this, and with signs of Google faltering in site ratings, we may see Facebook stealing their crown and taking over the web.