It’s a Facebook world after all

Interesting. Facebook is a hot topic in the marketing and tech world these days… and rightfully so.

In layman’s terms: facebook is no longer in the business of connecting people. They are in the business of connecting people to places, objects and services. The ramification of which could be significant. What’s happening?

In April, Facebook announced several major initiatives that will see Facebook weave it self into and across the web. Facebook’ has a host of social plug ins for you to use within your website that marries your site with Facebook enabling your visitors to see who in their network of friends:

1. is a member of this site too

2. likes the content

3. is tweeting commenting or being active on it right here, right now.

4.  is recommended as a pretty cool person to know

All with the intention of further personalizing your web experience and perhaps taking your likes and lumping them into common categories.  The evolution from connecting people to connecting people’s worlds has been talked about for several years. It is inevitable and a natural progression, only I didn’t expect it would come to be through an attempted monopoly.

If Facebook offers:

1. Live streaming of updates and activity – what does that mean for twitter?

2. Integration between recruitment sites and your network on facebook – what does that mean for linkedin?

3. geo- location services and apps where you can check in – what does that mean for foursquare?

This makes me wonder: what do facebook users think of facebook – I mean really?

1. Do we really care what all 350 of our friends are liking, doing, and commenting on?

2. When we like something – do we like it because we like it, or are we doing it to support a friend? in a moment of weakness? Do we return to that page we liked? do we engage it?

3. Is being part of a country sized network all it’s cracked up to be? Perhaps.

4. Why are we there? How many people do we really engage with on FB? How many of our friends are purely profile candy?

Then I wonder… what’s the opportunity here? Is it more niche networks? We already have 10 million of those. Is it to further build on what Facebook is already doing? Developers, although conflicted, may agree. Does the company or brand zero in on Facebook only? What about advertising being noise? being intrusive? being unwanted? How do they best use this new world of Facebook effectively?

We could very well see a replay of Beacon. Or we could see this continue for the next 12 months and evolve into Facebook schools, Facebook airlines, Facebook auctions and whatever else it mops up.

It will be interesting to not only monitor, but evolve with. More to come on this later.

photo credit: http://roughwriter.yc.edu