In my mental journey of gaining some insight into what is happening on the social web and with the social business transformation one of my best mental models came about with the simple revelation that business was shifting from a process and tech centric approach to a people centric approach. This idea, that people become the platform for the social business, is to me very powerful and changed the way I was looking at the social web. Over the weekend I was reading over some research on facebook's F8 conference announcements to prep for a call with a client today and that same revelation hit again, facebook's announcements were really about replacing a hyperlink / page centric web with a people centric one. There it is again, people as the platform...
At the F8 conference facebook announced its intent to create the "open graph" by facilitating the ability to connect the web through a graph API and social plug-ins which could embed functions on a page: "like" (there's an example of this plug-in on this blog on the right, feel free to test it :) ), recommendations, log-in and a social bar. This idea of connecting through a social graph instead of the traditional hyperlink approach is very compelling and in fact changes the whole fabric of the web in many ways over time. As "like" buttons appear across the web people can share content back to facebook but more importantly provide real-time data on the popularity (ranking) of web pages/sites. All of these plug-ins make adding these features fast and simple. Using OAuth 2.0 standards facebook Connect 2.0 provides new auto-login features and simplifies extending and connecting for sites. The recommend plug-in creates a network of social data on preferences all linked through the individual and the social presence bar, a connection that provides presence and chat capabilities on each site. All of this provides social data on activity streams and preferences across the web focused on individuals and recorded in facebook.
The changes to facebook profiles themselves also play into this new way of connecting the web through people. If you look closely at your new profile you will see that instead of random bits of information about you stored on your profile you are now tied to other sites/pages that represent that information (for example I'm interested in Porsche, it used to say just that under interest, now Porsche is linked to the Porsche page where I can see that 3 of my friends also like Porsche). This all weaves together a mountain of connected social data that all resides in facebook...associated to you of course.
So what could the Open Graph mean for the web, competitors, partners and us? I suppose for individuals it could mean even less privacy (not that we aren't moving down the path to a more open web "life" anyway). It also means an even higher level of connectivity around and through your social network. As web content owners are compelled to organize content for easier sharing and indexing in the more social context facebook takes on a much more central role in finding and maintaining the social content and its association to people. Does facebook's new method for organizing social content replace Google PageRank? People (and facebook) move to a more central position in the web instead of hyperlinks and pages. What could this mean for other (or new) social networks? I think we continue in a hub and spoke web connectivity model so I don't think LinkedIn or Twitter become irrelevant by any means, but I do think they take on a somewhat different role to facebook if facebook continues to get the high level of adoption of the Open Graph. This new concept also seems to be opening up new partner opportunities, like facebook and Microsoft's Doc offering aimed squarely at Google Docs.
