Facebook Will Conquer the Web by Destroying Facebook
There is no doubt that the changes announced yesterday at Facebook’s F8 conference will have a major impact on the web, how it looks, and how we use it in the coming months and years. The prospect of an open graph with the ability to transport your personal interests and preferences around the web with you is quite intriguing. This could also end up being the tool marketers have been clamoring for for years. They may now finally have the ability to hyper-target potential customers online at a scale large enough to demand huge advertising budgets.
But you can never gain one thing without losing something else. The web experience at large may benefit significantly from this, but it will be at the peril of the actual Facebook experience.
First, let’s look at who comprises the majority of a typical person’s Facebook friends. Most of our friends lists include not just family and good friends, but also former and current coworkers, some people we went to high school with, and a few random people who snuck through our approved friend requests. Whatever the reason, we are connected to these people because we, at least on some level, know them.
The point here is this - Most people care about the things shared on Facebook not because of the content itself as much as because of who is sharing that content. For example, I don’t necessarily love looking at pictures of babies, but will gladly spend time looking at pictures of my cousins baby because I love her. What I am not interested in, however, is seeing every site my cousin ‘likes’ across the web that features pictures of cute babies.
In the same way, I might enjoy seeing occasional updates from an uncle or former coworker. But what if this guy is a huge Tea Party supporter and bombards his friends’ News Feeds with countless articles about the Tea Party and Glenn Beck clips?
Just because you are friends doesn’t mean you care about the same things. People may argue about this, but Facebook is based on personal relationships, not on shared interests.
The thing is, people don’t want more information, they want more relevant information. In all honesty, most of your Facebook friends don’t care to see all of your Twitter posts or every restaurant you check-in to on Foursquare. If they did, they would follow you on those networks. That’s because different sites serve different purposes. For that reason, people use the sites and networks that they find the most interesting and valuable. Bringing all of your action from the web into one central location may be good for you, but it’s horrible for all of your friends.
As in any group, our Facebook friends break down into a few categories. There is a small group that never post anything, a large group that posts occasionally, and another small group that posts incessantly. Now, Facebook News Feeds will be completely taken over by the friends that feel the need to share everything they see on the web with everyone they know. So instead of the Facebook experience becoming more valuable, it becomes nearly unusable. That one post from your good friend you haven’t seen in a few months is now buried beneath a bevy of hipster pets and Justin Beiber gossip.
The open graph will create tremendous opportunities for developers to make the web much more interesting and personalized. Facebook is trying to do something huge here, and they may succeed. However, if they are not careful about protecting the user experience on Facebook itself, Facebook could be something that is only used on the open web, and no longer at Facebook.com.