Facebook rebrands the Internet
You may have noticed that each post here now has a Facebook “like” button on it. This is part of Facebook’s latest set of “social plug-ins” that were announced at F8. Rather than re-hash what they have done, though, I want to tell you what it means.
Step one: Facebook is going to make the whole Internet a community space. Everywhere you go, you will see what your friends liked on sites. You will know what movies they watched, what CNN articles they read, what YouTube videos they thought were funny. You will see their streams and comments annotating the Internet everywhere you go. And they will be able to reach out and chat to you on the chat bar at the bottom of your browser.
Step two: Facebook is going to be your identity card for the Internet. Facebook has always aimed at being the only login you will need. With this, they have made a strong play to have you just always be logged into Facebook, everywhere on the internet. All the top sites you use will simply expect you to be logged in, and over time we will see that functionality on the site will start to require this identity information. And soon after that, you will have to be on Facebook even if you don’t want to be.
Step three: Facebook will aggregate this data into a new type of search. Everything you do, all your opinions weighted by your like factor aka reputation), the combined graph data and aggregated community information, will be funneled back into the centralized database to form what today are called “pages.” This will become something akin to Wikipedia pages over time, only with constantly changing data and editorializing. Wikipedia data itself will be just a tab on this page. Amazon-style recommendation engines — and likely space for e-commerce — will sit alongside this; imagine a Wikipedia page on, say, a music recording, with an “you may also like” tab.
Step four: Facebook will be your virtual wallet. Once identity is everywhere but most importantly, secured on Facebook’s servers, then it will make more sense to buy on the Internet with those than with Paypal or a credit card. Especially since this virtual currency will be earned in any number of ways, such as via loyalty programs, frequent visitor programs, etc. Virtual currency will be used as a retention device and as a cross-promotional tool by businesses.
Step five: Facebook will push this into the real world, and become your id card for reality. You will come to the movie theater and walk up to the self-serve kiosk to buy your tickets. Under each movie will be the list of friends who liked it and their comments. You went in expecting to see one thing, but the theater knows you — and it tells you in no uncertain terms that you are going to like this other movie better. And you’ll pick based on those social recommendations. You will swipe your Credits card to buy your movie ticket using some credits you earned with the loyalty program in Farmville, and swipe it again to get into the theater. You watch the movie, which helpfully tells all your friends where you are and what you are doing. Any status updates you make from your phone during the movie are tagged with the movie, and get cross-referenced on the movie’s page on Facebook.com; after the first day, there’s a complete plot synopsis, review summary, and critical exegesis available there. When you leave, you wave your card at the “like” podium as you leave the movie — more loyalty points, more free tickets.
Think I am exaggerating? Facebook is literally trying to be
- AOL
- Meebo
- Digg
- last.fm
- Goodreads
- Paypal
- Foursquare
- Wikipedia
- Amazon
- VISA
- the semantic web
- …
Oh, they may not run all these businesses directly themselves. But this is what being the identity source of the Internet means. And with the partnerships that Facebook announced in tandem with these, they have been given a massive leg up. The battle is on — plenty of other big companies will now try to carve off pieces of this pie. But the core identity advantage is going to be hard to overcome.
Stage five may sound awesome to you. There is real delight in it. Just now I saw a tweet go by from @triptych:
wow. I went on pandora, it knew I was friends with josh whelchel and suggested music based off his work! @soundofjw
Yup, that is the magic. But I left out the part where people create Facebook identity skimmers and stand in front of the movie theater; where your history of likes gets analyzed by a third party and turned into direct marketing spam; where there’s a data breach and your credits get taken; where you lose a job because you once liked the wrong kind of site; where companies start paying people to form fake social graphs (“friend me and get free stuff!”) in order to push astroturfing influence into social recommendations; where Facebook bans you because you got rowdy, and now you have no virtual identity.
Welcome to a crazy new world.
67 Responses to “Facebook rebrands the Internet”
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Do I get a prize for being the first to Like this post? Wait, why am I typing in my name and email to post a comment here instead of it being done automatically through FB?
Because there’s quite a large amount of work to do to make the whole site like that. In fact, it probably involves redesigning the site!
My first response is to empty my profile. Luddite du jour.
We’ve become cattle to Silly Valley cowboys riding high with digital lassos. Whoopee cay yay yee, Mr. Moto.
I’m officially scared on a biblical scale.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Raph Koster and Michel, Michel. Michel said: what the wow. http://is.gd/bFfQg I just Facebook Liked a blog post without having to enter my username or password. […]
You can borrow my tin-foil hat, Raph. 🙂
You got most of it right. You won’t need to swipe your Credits card because Facebook also is investing in location and rfid. In fact they handed out rfid tags to f8 attendees for this very purpose. You’ll just have to walk into the movie and sit down. Facebook will handle the rest. I’m going to pretend that the act of actually going somewhere to see a movie is still a valid scenario since it’s immaterial to the example. 🙂
guess I’m the one that got it wrong. Browser-fail cut off your last paragraph. My bad. Except for the whole movie thing…
The RFID is what I meant… they will need an active action to identify Like, so for those kiosks it’ll be close-range swipe. They will need an active check for ticket holders, so that will be a swipe. For merely being in the theater, it’ll be passive sensing by the door.
@coppertopper I’m with you on that one. The privacy implications of something like this are huge. That said, I’m scared cause I can’t find a whole lot to disagree with in the article. It’s all very plausible and our DoJ is too busy looking at Intel and Microsoft to notice. How long until Facebook buys Microsoft?
BTW, Raph..
Is the login page popup for Facebook always a http address and not a https address? I’ve never looked but the one from this like button is clear text http when asking me for my account information to Facebook.
Don’t mind Derek… we try not to let him on the internet unsupervised…
Derek, the like button just uses your browser cookie for Facebook.
I wonder what the point is for me to limit who can view my facebook wall, if it is not protected on the web. Do my fb privacy settings also travel with this like button, etc?
Ok, I have a great love for technology and find it very interesting. But, I find some scenarios that could come from this frightening. I like to keep MY business MY business and only give out what I feel people need to know, or what I want them to know, myself. I don’t need, nor do I want a company giving out “my personal business” for me. What I do, where I go and what I “like” should be things that only I personally volunteer to my friends, family or strangers. Makes me long for the good old “morse code days”.
+1 for terrified. I’d probably rather unplug myself than live in that future.
Sigh, the future was better when it was about being a cyborg.
“Baaaa..” said the sheep to the slaughter.
Gamerz happy now?. Youve made life one big game with Zuckenberg’s investors the gamemasters.
You know, a huge part of my job revolves around social media.
And this scares the crap out of me.
I don’t mind sharing some information. There’s certain stuff that I don’t mind the world knowing at all, and I couldn’t care less if they did. However, the idea that people can easily see what movies I’m watching, what music I’m listening to what websites I’m visiting, and basically having every aspect of my life shot out as a spotlight for the world, is about the opposite of what I want.
I sure hope I’m not alone in that.
If anything stops Facebook’s march to world domination it won’t be privacy issues, it’ll be the fickle finger of fashion. It’s been cool to be on Facebook for quite a while now but who’s to say if that will last?
Some things stay cool almost forever, but most don’t. Facebook is taking its best shot at moving form a cool thing to an essential thing, but it’s by no menas an inevitable transition.
One rather ironic thing seems to be that veteran online gamers, who might be expected to be among the most comfortable with the gaming of the world seem to be among the most resistant to the charms of social networks. Personally, I still don’t even have a mobile phone and I can’t say I feel the lack of it yet.
[…] Facebook Like button, inspired by seeing Raph Koster tweet about adding it to his site and thinking “Oh, cool.” Note to Raph: please don’t tweet about jumping off […]
Heh heh heh… they can TRY. They’re reckoning without the inventiveness of the hacker, indie, and entrepreneur communities. They’re also looking regulation in the face. I wouldn’t try this crap under a Democratic administration.
Don’t like Amazon? Check out BookMooch, the anti-Amazon.
Okay. So. I’m trying to open Facebook and I’m getting a blank page. What’s next, a “fail whale”?
The interesting bit is that they’re also moving away from supporting Facebook Connect for WordPress blogs and just outright hosting/owning the comments by integrating them into Facebook.
This means if a blog embraces that, to participate in a comment thread you’d need to (a) be logged into Facebook and (b) be willing to be non-anonymous.
I can see a lot of pushback happening there. At least from my hardcore-gamer side of the universe!
@csven, Facebook was having some really annoying uptime issues around that time. I was trying to turn off a “share your stuff with select partners” thing and it was hard to maintain a page load.
I’m not worried about this re: privacy issues; I’m mostly worried about this because I don’t trust Facebook. If it had been someone else, I’d be suspicious, but optimistic. But FB has never shown itself to care about human beings tmk.
But if you’re not already logged in then the login page comes up in a popup and that page is plain old http. Now that I check, Facebook’s main page with the login dialog is plain old http. That should only add to the fear people have over this. If this is supposed to be my identity online then authenticating against it from ANY site should be a secure connection to Facebook’s servers.
I checked further and https to the login page for Facebook works but there is no redirect from a http connection to ensure encrypted authentication. That’s a pretty glaring usability error in my opinion.
Am I the only one who’s really disgusted that Facebook ASSUMES I want it to do all of this stuff? The most recent thing with changing strings to “pages” had a whole “like it or leave it” feel to it – and lead to me deleting a huge chunk of my profile that was there for friends-only. I really think Facebook has established an annoying trend of overstepping its bounds and violating its users’ privacy in favor of moving toward a position that they can make money off of. The more they do it, the more people will start to realize it, and the more they’ll be digging their own grave with each new privacy-violating feature.
And I doubt they care. I think they’ve resigned themselves to bleeding a certain percentage of their users as acceptable losses on their path to Taking Over The Internets. I think it’ll ultimately work for them and be profitable, but I think it’s slimy and unethical to prod your users toward giving up more and more personal information to outside sources.
They’re about one unwanted “upgrade” from getting dumped, here.
But it’s not in your RSS feed. ‘net coup fail!
Or simply more convergence hype. The last successful “Swiss Army Knife product” was the Swiss Army Knife.
Probably, Morgan. On the other hand, expression of intent is the surest predictor of future behavior. Time to empty the profiles, create imaginary characters and fill the FB dbs with Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
Let markets deal with them.
lol, len….I already emptied mine and my Space Ghost is on the way 😉
If it was a government that was doing this I’d be the first to cry “NOOOOOO!” and retreat to my cave disconnected from the world.
Am I crazy to have faith in the fact that Facebook will have to keep its end users (us) and its customers (all the big corporations) happy and using their service, which means that they’ll have to ensure the security of our data and let us control how they use it.
Their income will depend on them following our rules as we will literally hold the purse strings. As long as they play nice and give us what we want I don’t see a problem.
I do think you take it to an extreme though Raph, I hope your tounge was firmly in your cheek 😀
@mandrill (#29), Their income will depend on them following our rules as we will literally hold the purse strings. As long as they play nice and give us what we want I don’t see a problem.
Um, what? I haven’t directly paid Facebook a cent. They have social inertia. They have Vitoc. Their users aren’t going anywhere unless a really big player steps up, and not even Google can match them at this point.
What form of accountability do you really hold over them?
“I wouldn’t try this crap under a Democratic administration.”
@EarnestAdams: you made a statement to this effect in your article dissecting “evil” design practices when contrasting China vs. the US. I think you grossly overestimate the degree to which the USA is still a Democracy, and by that I mean you assign it a degree of democracy greater than 0.
Just adblocked *.facebook.com, *.facebook.net, and *.fbcdn.com for all domains except facebook.com. Giving them the ability to both track my web browsing habits (thanks to sites mindlessly embedding the like button crap) and slow down the web (thanks to sites mindlessly embedding the like button crap) doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
I *love* the bit where you have to individually opt out of every partner site that they work with — that’s how you can tell they have your best interest at heart….
How did you do that?
add these rules to block facebook and their cdn stuff:
*.facebook.com
*.facebook.net
*.fbcdn.net
add these exception rules to not block facebook for facebook.com:
@@*.facebook.com$domain=facebook.com
@@*.facebook.net$domain=facebook.com
@@*.fbcdn.net$domain=facebook.com
Enjoy a faster, less privacy-violating web browsing experience.
Thank you. The “like” embed looks horrible.
I think stage one is last week, stages two and three are in the next couple of months, and stage four is over the next year or two. I don’t know when stage five is, but they were live testing some of it (RFID-enabled cards with location info) at F8 last week. It really isn’t science fiction, not very much anyhow.
I *love* the bit where you have to individually opt out of every partner site that they work with — that’s how you can tell they have your best interest at heart….
Btw, there’s a setting under (I believe) Application Settings -> Instant Personalization where you can uncheck a box. I’m supposed to RT that, but eh. Not, you know, that this was publicized whatsoever.
Read the fine print under that checkbox. That just blocks YOUR sharing, not your friends sharing of YOU. To block that you have to block each app or adjust the other settings for what your friends can share.
*sigh* And after reading this, I promptly ‘liked’ it, so I can share it with all my friends on FB who need to read it.
I enjoy social networking sites, but I dislike that my personal information has become something that I or OTHERS can freely trade away.
To me the issue is that we’re living in a world of information overload. We simply cannot absorb everything that’s being thrown at us from all of these different directions. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Buzz etc… it’s becoming impossible to keep up with it all so of course the obvious solution is to try and tie it all together into one ubiquitous package. Whichever company can do that is going to end up ruling the world 🙂
[…] Raph Koster about how Facebook will evolve: […]
Okay, correct me if I’m wrong here, but is the assumption that Facebook would somehow dominate “the whole internet” not very US-centric? There are many countries, cultures, age groups, language groups etc which passionately prefer other networks and platforms – sometimes for the wrong (anti-US) reasons, sometimes because other networks simply somehow tune in more efficiently in those other cultures. I don’t think one should ignore the diversity which flourishes on the social web and internet.
It’s ok, Raph, calm down. Facebook won’t take over “the whole Internet”. It can’t. The net, um, routes around attempts to take it over, um, doesn’t it? And you shouldn’t make wild predictions about the hand that feeds you, that’s biting.
And in face, Facebook *is* an attempt by the Net to route around the takeover of Google and Wikipedia.
Google, the ad agency that has made global search, a needed utility like water or electricity, something that they can harness as a revenue-generating business with billions in revenue. Their appetite has grown to take over other sectors like broadband and telephony and more. Wikipedia is the helpmate to Google, showing up first in every search just about, except for the Edelman, the ad agency, which makes sure that doesn’t happen, and except for Umair, who is like a strange vampire in the mirror, with no Wikipedia about himself despite his prolific writings and tremendous influence.
Twitter and Facebook, proprietary platforms (and that is a GOOD thing, Raph) arose and posed a significant challenge to the relentless, scraping, technocommunist Google. Both these platforms are techocommies too, but sort of Eurocommunists to Google’s Soviet communism and democratic centralism.
Both of them created a new search that was outside the bounds of Google and run not by what they had constructed to show up first — Wikipedia and other most linked stuff — but what real people really thought should be first for their friends. A different principle, less mechanistic, biased but less prone to gaming and buying and bombing.
The world needs both mechanical gamed ad-strewn search and friend-search, and multiple types of competitors with both models to keep totalitarianism from happening.
Totalitarianism is not happening due to Facebook or Twitter; they fight Google’s totalitarianism so we have a plurality of giants now, and thank God for it.
Many people resist the pushed Facebook connect on every website (I’m one of them). They start to have less choices if they do and can’t even log on to some areas now, but they have Disqus, which is a sturdy competitor and works very well. What what happens to Disqus. OpenID, I don’t take seriously, it’s a goofball opensource clusterfrak that is broken and never works and is ideological and will be routed around.
Unfortunately, Facebook being hackery but more of the revised hack culture like Bill Gates, was still technocommie enough to try to “make something out of nothing” and make money only indirectly off the New Class of API engineers and flash games that generate cash (but not to them directly). FB sells ads directly, but that doesn’t make enough revenue to keep servers going for 450 million people.
So if you notice, FB has started, like Russia, to sell off its precious metals and hydrocrabons and caviar to feed its technocommunism. It has started selling search space to Google, so there is a google invsion underneath your FB results now. Twitter has done the same.
FB is still waiting to cook up the right biz model that will compete with Google, make money out of technocommunism, and prove Prokofy wrong.
Right now, the VC capital propping up FB is, interestingly, the Soviet Union’s richest techocommunist oligarch. Go and study how him and his company have increasingly taken over shares of FB and other social media platforms.
Like the Soviet Union, like Myspace, Facebook will collapse/split up/ have big failures and become very different, yet still somewhat the same in 10 years.
Facebook is an American and Russian debt waiting to be purchased by the Chinese.
Yes, hold your applause, I realize my analysis is brilliant : )
Seriously, what will be funny to watch is how all these people bitch about FB “taking over” and how Ebil it is, who are absolutely morally blind to the evil of Google. They will rant and rave about how there is no “open social” here with “open standards” or “opensource” blah blah, even though opensource is #fail. It does not work unless some big IT company comes along and scoops up the free labour and makes it work right (which is why it works on the Internet with Apache, etc. so spare me the lectures about how I am soaking in opensource).
Nobody needs to make an opensource impoverished-from-the-get-go social platform that rewards only a few consultants and one or two big IT oligarchs (the Google model of Free). The economy has been happier with a huge roster of API engineers who make bank, and a short list of flash game millionaires who make bank — it’s more robust, more pluralistic, and more stable. And that New Class, which includes you, Raph, will work to make sure Facebook doesn’t fall to Google, and is not bought by any Big IT thing, but keeps its independence.
Twitter will be unable to be truly global because it can’t scale and will crack up into pieces too that will be sold off. There will be tviter.ru etc.
One point of information: a lot of these sites that now connect with Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, OpenID *don’t work* because either the opensourceniks setting up the sites that use them with Drupal or whatever don’t know what they are doing or something just isn’t “right”.
Example: Henry Jenkin’s blog has sign in with Facebook or Twitter which simoply doesn’t work.
It might not be science fiction, but it is a pipe dream. In your post, you devote one sentence to the reality of the market: “The battle is on — plenty of other big companies will now try to carve off pieces of this pie.” That changes everything. That dynamic, which seems excessively trivialized in your post, is so very important. Market forces repel centralization. What happened to your usually reasoned, business-savvy analyses? You seem to have fallen prey to the hype, my friend, or at the very least, you’ve let your imagination run wild.
Roland, I would not discount network effects. Facebook is by far the largest of the social networks, which has resulted in its API being adopted by other SNSes. In addition, this protocol is open enough that I expect to see it adopted by others as well.
They have a fair amount of growth left in them internationally. But I would expect that growth to continue.
It’s certainly true they will not have a monopoly. But they could very easily end up dominating anyway.
Prokofy, I’ve certainly said plenty about my concerns over Google, too. 🙂 There is a reason I do not use gmail or google docs…!
Actually, market forces do not repel centralization once there is a critical mass of customers. Hence the term network effects.
The best argument I have heard against this scenario is that instead, it’ll happen via the browser. The problem with that is that the browser does not have the identity base.
Market forces, unregulated, lead inevitably to trusts and monopolies –which in any sensible society, leads eventually to antitrust legislation.
This is why for the past three decades in America, the corporatists have been waging a war to dismantle Federal authority from the inside, while their psyops divisions try to convince people that private corporations are more accountable and trustworthy than a democratic government.
It’s Orwell meets Huxley, screenplay by Ellison. And in many ways, the Internet is ground zero.
I think Facebook’s bid for dominance is doomed, but it won’t be the last player to grab for the one true ring.
[…] believe that, with the Open Graph API, Facebook will become a semantic search engine and own our online identities. Tags: Facebook, facebook advertising, privacy function publish () { prompt_message […]
And thus, the first Cylon was born.
[…] has released a new API SDK and after reading Raph's post about the new API, I'm concerned for the future of social networking. Raph posits a world […]
Time to ensure I have facebook accounts for all my other personas….
And you don’t need facebook skimmers at the movie theaters. You just need facebook phishers dropped on any website.
It is rather disingenuous for a company which encourages its members to divulge their email & PASSWORDS so it can “help” them by importing their contact lists, to then go around and make any sort of claim that online identity is some how a concrete unstealable object…
The more valuable you make the facebook identity, the more likely people will want to steal it.
I don’t think Facebook can make a strong play on the paypal market. First, the regulation there is way different than they’ve encountered so far. Second, most people I know do *not* want to be “always logged in” to their bank account. I’m glad amazon patented one-click shopping if it means everyone else has to have an explicit checkout screen.
Its not that Facebook will got he way of MySpace, Yahoo, or AOL before it.IT WILL.
The real HORROR STORY is that we’ll have another “silly name” vc backed monster to takes its place every 5 years. That’s the real evil of technology as religion, with no regulations other than the “market”.
As proven again and again, the market doesnt work unregulated. Like technology it creates 9 out of 10 “Pets.com” and waistes our time and humanity following “gimicks” that only make us more dependent on the technologies offered.
A single provider of identity is a *really* bad thing. FB lead or not, I hope sites using their ID service also support google, openID, etc.
On another note, the network effects aside, I don’t think it’s hard for someone to beat FB. The limited way in which they treat relationships seems like a design flaw they will forever duct tape until they collapse under their own weight. I wrote a post about this some time back, here:
http://www.kimpallister.com/2009/09/its-complicated-or-beating-facebook.html
That’s a good paper, Kim. Indeed, in role-based systems, a single identity may be authorizedBy or authorize membership or property associations (eg, persons tables, role tables, organization tables, skills table, events tables, resources, etc. etc.). Depending on the application of the roles to security roles, they may be extensible or baked.
Your presentation reminds me a little of the early pre-web battle for hypertext language standards. HTML was too simple to do what most of us had in mind for network document database work because it could not represent the associations and objects obviously useful for very large hypermedia systems that enable operations support.
Social media are a subclass of communications client tech. You will see similar abstract notions of these relationships in, for example, national response framework emergency support function frameworks. Substitute dispatch, operations and analysis for the games, and the rest is very similar to the kinds of objects OpenGraph talks about.
So even if FB isn’t yet a fully-realized comm framework, it has the right ideas for scaling out horizontal and simple before complexifying and integrating vertical (hierarchical) relationships.
Damn…I can’t wait!
Am I the only one who reads the prediction and gets all bright-eyed?
[…] Facebook decides to rebrand the Internet […]
Ooh, hope I’m not too late to the party!
(Also, I saw you linked to TUAW in your Nintendo/Apple thing… I think my story came first on Download Squad, but TUAW and Engadget rarely credit us — lamers!)
My main interest in all this is the end-game. I don’t know where it’s LEADING. Your first five steps are a good start (even despite the bad bits) — but what about the rest of… civilization? Government?
I don’t see the first five steps as being particularly revolutionary. There’s been that kind of integration for a long time now, just not all through one service — and not so streamlined.
As you say, what happens when Facebook deletes your account?
People rebelled heavily against the ‘ID card’ system in the UK — but is it better to have a Facebook ID card, or a Governmental ID card?
I wish I knew.
People rebelled heavily against the ‘ID card’ system in the UK — but is it better to have a Facebook ID card, or a Governmental ID card?
Shadowrun time?
Things are definitely heading towards the existence of a steamy, seedy underbelly of society 🙂
Awesome. I call dibs on goblinizing into a troll.
[…] This article by Raph Koster says it all really: ‘Facebook will become your ID card for reality’. “You will swipe your Credits card to buy your movie ticket using some credits you earned with the loyalty program in Farmville, and swipe it again to get into the theater. You watch the movie, which helpfully tells all your friends where you are and what you are doing.” […]
[…] worth $5 Billion = a lot more billions than WoW). Which is one of the reasons why game-gurus like Ralph Koster say “you will have to be on Facebook even if you don’t want to be.” We should be able to engage users as well as have a more accessible entry point from both browser […]
[…] This article by Raph Koster says it all really: ‘Facebook will become your ID card for reality’. “You will swipe your Credits card to buy your movie ticket using some credits you earned with the loyalty program in Farmville, and swipe it again to get into the theater. You watch the movie, which helpfully tells all your friends where you are and what you are doing.” […]