Anthony Franco ISM 158 May 6, 2010
The “Like” button is a feature created by Facebook for users to interact with others by showing their approval of someone’s status, photo, or wall post. Recently, the like button has replaced the “Become a fan” button on Facebook. This change was due to the belief that liking a celebrity or a brand is much more casual than becoming a fan.
Facebook allows businesses to create their own ads and publish them on user pages. Facebook also allows businesses to filter who they wish to see their advertisement by choosing the optimal target group for their product. It is simple to filter to the correct target audience on Facebook because every user provides personal information about themselves and their taste on the site.
Facebook recently unveiled the Open Graph, an ambitious plan to map all people’s relationships to each other and to the objects they care about, like bands, movies, books and restaurants. It involves spreading new plugins and “Like” buttons across millions of sites and tagging huge swaths of the Web so Facebook can better analyze those pages.
For several years it has been assumed that the next leap forward (web 3.0) will be “the semantic web”, an internet in which web pages contain the intelligence that allows search engines to understand the qualitative aspects of those pages. Search engines like Google approximate value judgements of sites by looking at the number and relevance of links to a page coming from other web pages - a link is considered to be a human endorsement.
The more “popular” a page is, according to its link structure, the more likely it is that Google will recommend the page in its search results. But it can't tell if a recipe produces a good cake, if a joke is funny, if a news story is true, or if an image is awesome. And it can't tell whether a page is inherently pleasing.
The potential now exists for Facebook to launch a search engine that reflects the true popularity of web pages. Coupled with everything that the service knows about each member's interests and demographics, search results may be filtered by multiple dimensions (e.g. show me the pages about “spring fashion trends” that are most popular with South African year old females who also like Desperate Housewives). Hook into that power a highly-targetable Facebook version of pay-per-click advertising that website owners can place as easily as Like buttons, and Google may well become the MySpace of search, once unbeatable and now humbled.
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