New plans revealed this week by Facebook stand poised to provide a major change in the internet. The Facebook F8 event, patterned after the MacWorld expo, was host to several major announcements by the social media powerhouse, many of which may have far reaching implications in the way that the Internet functions. Facebook, with 500 million users, is already a huge player in the on line world, commanding huge advertising revenues and an impressive amount of social and cultural relevance. With the new initiatives announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is expanding out of the semi-walled garden that it has resided in until now and expanding out into the Internet as a whole, directly challenging Google with alliances to Microsoft.
Essentially the ‘like’ option in Facebook will expand out into the Net. It also connects users to a social fingerprint, dragging along Facebook information with them to other sites and allowing Facebook to gather even more information than it does now. By partially opening up Facebook to the wider web, Zuckerberg has expanded the amount of customer data it has access to and with the advent of a Facebook wide ‘currency’ called the credit, it incorporates a distributed system for commerce across the entire net.
This is a major change in the way that the world’s largest social network interacts and it will have far reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, some of which are discussed in more depth here: http://scobleizer.com/2010/04/22/facebook-ambition/