Up until the point of Facebook announcing the extended Open Graph at f8 this year, i believed that the true sustainable value of facebook was the social empowerment of other sites via facebook connect. When asked whether facebook was yet another social network fling that would be killed by the next big thing (“look what happened to MySpace”), i would answer that facebook as a destination site may loose its attraction, but that the fact that it empowers millions of other sites via facebook connect would make it a sustianable social infrastructure.

Got Spam? 

Then facebook announced the extended Open Graph and Ticker, which to me is a move away from empowering other sites externally towards becoming more platform-centric and getting companies to develop inside facebook. As an example: Whereas the Washington Post could have created a facebook enabled news experience via facebook connect on washingtonpost.com, the new Open Graph API was convincing enough to build the Social Reader, an app within facebook.

I personally wish facebook had stayed true to its external empowerment strategy and stayed away from trying to force all social utility to take place inside facebook. The news feed is becoming very spammy and only a fraction of my social graph ends up seeing a status update that may be dear to my heart. My feed is just too overcrowded with app data. Not to mention the ticker, which i consider a property of very little value to app developers. Promoted as the holy grail to reaching users in real-time, i very much doubt the ticker’s effectiveness and would love to see some conversion data on apps that get pushed through it.

Let THEM be social

As a result of these changes I visit facebook.com, the destination site, less often and can only hope for it to re-focus on empowering sites externally. That way i could have a social news experience when i choose to visit a news site, not when i choose to connect with my friends. 

In the end, however, it is the PIs and clicks that count. During his presentation at f8 Mark Zuckerberg spoke about “increasing engagement”, but what he clearly meant was increasing PIs and clicks, which is what ultimately monetizes the platform. How else one may argue can a site that has reached almost everyone in the digital world grow further? So facebook may end up becoming a spammy beast of a platform, rather than an elegant social software for the whole web.

My 5  cents! What do you think? 

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