Is Facebook the New Borg of the Internet?

Is Facebook the new Borg of the internet?

After watching F8 yesterday, I walked away afterwards, thinking that it was boring and Highly predicable, I did find the Facebook Social Plug Ins to be interesting but nothing new or revolutionary.

But I was reminded of the Star Trek episodes that revolved around the Borg. The Borg was a race of Cybernetic space travelers. There catch phrase was Resistance is futile prepare to be assimilated! I thought WOW I could so see Facebook in this role.

Here is my review of the 5 Social Plug ins they announced;

1) The Like button is the simplest social plugin. No login is required, and it will run in an iframe. Even if you've never visited CNN before, you'll get social context when you visit the site. Now, when users show up to sites that use it, you can see which of your friends like the site, or have engaged with it recently, without the site knowing anything about you. And when users like anything, it automatically gets added to the list of things they like on their profile.

2) The Activity Stream plugin is like a filtered view of the News Feed containing updates just from your site. It's also just one line of code.

3) The Recommendations plugin provides suggestions for things your users might like. The algorithm is based on both the collective mutual interests of all your site's users, as well as the user's personal friends.

4) The Facebook Login plugin works like the existing Facebook Connect login button, but now also shows users photos of all their friends who have already joined the site.

5) The Social Bar plugin is a comprehensive toolbar that includes the Like button, friends who like the site, and Facebook Chat.

So lets see number 1 the like button this is a given I see no harm in a Like button on your page.

Now number's 2, 3, 4 holy god I could see where selectively these could be great enhancements to a website, accept for the fact they announced #5 the Social bar this single plugin makes 2,3,4 kind of unimportant. But we all know that some people will use all five on one page and this is going to make their page look like some weird hybrid cross between their website and Facebook.

Now their big announcement was on the Open Graph this was rather interesting and seemed to be useful as a enhancement for any website including a static not just a interactive one.

Why simple cross connecting sites is a great marketing Idea we have do this for years with Links and Back Links so this is a new spin on what we know works. What I like best is the fact that it is simple and unnoticeable to the user because it merely is a few lines of code; here is the best explanation I can give you

Example,

represents the movie "The Godfather". When that object is marked up on a website, Liking it will place it in the right place on the user's profile, and mousing over it in the feed will show a hovercard that links to the source object off Facebook.com - for example, IMDB.

In addition, publishers who use the Open Graph markup will be able to publish updates to users after they Like the object on their site. More details on that shortly.

Graph API

Finally, with the Graph API, developers will able to get information on any object in the Facebook graph. With the Open Graph, each object has a unique ID. You can download the JSON representation of any object in the graph simply by going to:

http://graph.facebook.com/[ObjectName]/[ObjectType]

where ObjectName could be a user or Page ID (like justinsmith or Starbucks), and ObjectType could be photos, videos, notes, etc.

The final take away was Facebook is also giving developers a new search API, and will be reimplementing authentication on the OAuth 2.0 standard. Their wasn't much information on this, But OAuth 2.0 has long been expected to become the standard in signin authorization so again no surprise here.

So there you have it Facebook's F8 in a nutshell - But if you ever watched the show Star Trek you will see why we have to ask is Facebook the next Borg? My personal thoughts are Not Really but Webmasters must be careful when implementing these Plugin's as it could clutter up your site and more importantly you could find you become dependent upon Facebook and being dependent on any other Business is never good for your Business.

It should be noted they mention almost in passing Facebook credits, and I am also briefly commenting on Facebook Credits with unless they are going to somehow make a true revolutionary advancement in online payment processing I will sick with my current Payment Processors ( Google Checkout, Paypal) otherwise this might be a mere side thought if you added it to say a Drop down menu are something! Think about it like this if you sell a 800 dollar Laptop Do you want $800.00 Dollars are 800 Facebook Credits?