Ben Elowitz, “Facebook Boldly Annexes the Web“:
The most confusing thing about the so-called “Social Web” has been that it’s too often thought of as an entirely separate Web unto itself. It’s as though Facebook and Twitter are different planets in the solar system – digital orbs that we can shuttle to and from with the flick of a click. And, sometimes, it’s almost as if they aren’t even in the same cyber-galaxy.
Until today.
That’s because Facebook today advanced its “Open Graph” integration with the rest of the Web, releasing a new set of media-oriented features, and finally tying its own planet inextricably to — if not outright annexing — the rest of the digital universe.
Over the last several months, as a Beta partner in this initiative, it’s become clear to me that this is far more than just an end-user feature. If you look closely at these enhancements, and use them — as I have — you realize that Facebook is making a giant leap forward in the media cosmos; and you sense, meanwhile, that Google could easily be left on its Earth-bound launchpad, held back by commercial gravity.
What makes all this so Earth-shattering?
Simply said, with a few extra lines of code on any Web page, Facebook now becomes the hub for every user’s action — watching a video, reviewing a recipe, clicking a page, reading an article, and much more.
But beyond that, those same lines of code are driving a powerful and fundamental transition underneath the pages themselves: transforming them from the bits and bytes of abject HTML code, text, and images into much-needed, and much sought-after, meaning. In essence, Facebook is taking these enhancements and initiating the first major advance in deciphering the Internet since the hyperlink itself.
And, in the process, Facebook is confirming the fact that it’s the new and undisputed “social operating system” on today’s people-centric Web.
To be sure, Facebook now controls the ebb and flow of human connectivity, inter-personal sharing and relationships on the Internet.
The end result is that Facebook will now do what Google can’t. Or, put another way, Facebook will now be able to fulfill Google’s very own mission better than Google itself can, succeeding at a whole new level of organizing and making accessible all the world’s information — not to mention its activities and human participants.