Facebook introduced a new Internet connectivity model, the Open Graph protocol, a new Graph API, and a set of social plugins at its f8 developers conference in San Francisco yesterday. This new model should allow ecommerce developers to access data about Facebook users and provide advanced personalization the first time that a user arrives on a retailer's website.
Facebook's new core platform also raises questions about privacy in the Open Graph and Facebook's role.
"There are two important themes behind everything we're delivering today," said Brett Taylor, Facebook's director of platform products and the former CEO of FriendFeed. "First, the web is moving to a model based on the connections between people and all the things they care about. Second, this connections-based web is well on its way to being built and providing value to both users and developers — the underlying graph of connections just needs to be mapped in a way that makes it easy to use and interoperable."
To help map the graph, Facebook introduced these products.
Social Plugins
Using just a single line of HTML or JavaScript, a developer can add one of several new Facebook social plugins. This set of plugins allow you to place a Facebook Like button, for example, on a product detail page, as retail brand Sephora has done on its site.
Shoppers with the Facebook cookie, will see a list of Facebook friends that have "Liked" a particular product.
Other plugins provide a list of friend activity on a site, a Facebook-powered commenting system, and product recommendations.
The Open Graph Protocol
According to Taylor, "the Open Graph protocol opens up the social graph and lets your pages become objects that users can add to their [Facebook] profiles. When a user establishes this connection by clicking Like on one of your Open Graph-enabled pages, you gain the lasting capabilities of Facebook pages: a link from the user's profile, ability to publish to the user's news feed, inclusion in search on Facebook, and analytics through our revamped Insights product."
Put simply, this protocol, in combination with the social plugins, provides Facebook with data about how its users interacted with the page or site you built in exchange for providing a link from Facebook back to the page in question. You can also develop your site to send updates to Facebook users that "Liked" a product, which will be posted on that user's wall.
Graph API
Facebook also released a new Graph API which will replace its current API.
"The Graph API is not only simpler, it is more powerful," Taylor said. "We've enabled a search feature, which lets you search over objects like people and events, and over the stream — both public stream updates and personalized ones for your users. In addition, the graph is ever-changing, so we're launching real-time updates to let you subscribe to updates to user data. We'll continue to support our old REST API, but will focus future improvements on the Graph API."
Implications
Facebook's new platform does seem like it is worth checking out for ecommerce products, but there are still some unanswered questions.
For example, will users be aware that that Facebook is aggregating preference data about them? Do they realize that by "Liking" a product on a retail site that they are granting permission, in some cases, for that retailer to post updates on the user's Facebook wall or share their preferences with other shoppers?
Also, is this what Facebook is really for? Most Facebook users play games or connect with friends and family members, so is it really the best place store personal preferences in products, news articles, and trends?
In some way, only time will tell. But it does mean that the sites you're developing can greet Facebook users by name the first time that user arrives on-site; share product recommendations based on what a shopper's Facebook friends liked; and even add product information to Facebook pages.
