Facebook’s delivery of social plugins including the “Like Button” last week will change the fabric of the internet, from link-based, to like-based. “Like” is the new link.
A lot of us were anticipating something big from the Facebook F8 conference, and we weren’t disappointed when Mark Zuckerberg announced the Open Graph initiative and Social Plugins, notably the “Like button.”
Soon after F8 concluded, a group of us convened to recap and discuss. KickApps CEO Alex opened the subject and asked what we thought. Our head of product Mike Sommers offered a perspective I hadn’t considered, but which made immediate sense. The gist of his thesis is that Google has owned relevancy and web organization on account of controlling the index of success between linked pages, but that Facebook has abstracted the direct linkage of pages to linkage of content and people, via the “Like button”. People are beginning to consume the web based on personal recommendations, rather than by Page Rank relevancy. This consumption behavior is increasing, and if it continues on this vector, Facebook can overtake Google in searches, which is a big deal.
Today, the new Facebook searches aren’t directed query-based searches like Google searches, but browsing-recommendation-based searches. Google’s approach, strictly semantic (relevance of crawled textual meaning) and concentration-based (amount of links to), will lack Facebook’s social recommendation filter and its increasing popularity. Facebook may even add semantic and concentration-based inputs to their algorithm. I would imagine that is already in work, and to up the ante, I would bank on Facebook’s introducing a semantic and socially-filterable search box in the next 2-5 months. The search box would not just show you content your friends liked, but content the world liked (with options to filter by your friends or sets of degrees of separation).
So back to our recap meeting at KickApps – here’s what we did. Agreed that we were enthused by these developments due to the opportunities that they opened for KickApps to integrate major-client private-domain social software with the leading horizontal social net Facebook, a few of us set to work defining how we would best participate in this ecosystem, from everything as mundane as how it’s integrated to our corporate site, to how it gets integrated to our platform.
Then, the final a-ha! moment for me. Today, after we had completed the first step of introducing Like buttons and the Like box to our corporate site and blog, I notified the staff that we had done so in an e-mail. I was typing the e-mail and was trying to type “I want to see a whole lotta liking going on” and out of habit (I guess) or subconsciously having dwelt on this subject a lot (perhaps), I instead wrote “I want to see a whole lotto linking going on.”
Realization: I had had a Freudian slip of “link” for “like”. It hit me – they’re the same thing, but the latter directly connects people with content.
And as Mike said in our F8 recap meeting (and I noted in my journal), “the social metadata of liking, rating, commenting on, and sharing content, can become more important or relevant than the content itself.”
Like is the new link