experience matters

Adam Bracegirdle | Critical Mass Calgary

Timeliness is of benefit in this industry, and although Facebook’s announcement of the open graph protocol happened an eternity ago by web standards, I feel in this case the ramifications of such an event demand a step back. To say that the open graph protocol is ‘revolutionary’ is in my opinion an understatement. Many will say “Facebook is late to the game. Google, Yahoo and MySpace all have a shared standard for OpenID through OpenSocial, ergo, this is a non-event”. My reply to that is simply, not really. Nothing has been done at this level. Not to mention none of those services come near Facebook in terms of user-engagement. I don’t think we’ll fully realize how profound this moment is for a number of years. And I don’t just mean in terms of the internet. This has the potential to change the way we buy products, how we react to world events, what music we listen to and how we find it, among many other things. I won’t say it’s a ‘good thing’ as that is, and will remain, a point surrounded in a great deal of debate. I will however say that I believe this is certainly a moment worth looking at.
On the surface it seems as though Facebook is attempting in this moment to centralize the internet around it’s own service. Of course they don’t word it that way, “The open graph puts people at the center of the web.” says CEO Mark Zuckerberg “It means the web can become a series of personally and semantically meaningful connections.” Sounds vaguely positive to me, and if the new Facebook graph protocol seemed slightly confusing to you at first, you’re not alone. I was scratching my head a little too, so I’ll start by explaining  it’s core functionality and then I’ll expand on the merits of each point.

It all starts with social plug-ins; these allow Facebook to be ported pretty much anywhere. When you visit a site that’s using social plug-ins, you’ll be able to see all the people in your network who have visited before, what they did there and if they recommend or ‘liked’ anything on the page. This to me represents the nail in the coffin when it comes to digital channel convergence. Once Facebook roots itself in the online experience with social plug-ins we can no longer consider social a channel at all. It becomes the experience, and instant personalization is the result. Of course user-engagement and the ubiquity of the plug-in will effect how personal your experience can be. Facebook has addressed this by using cookies and iFrames to remember a user no matter where they are in addition to providing developers with a far simpler, robust API and an open authentication protocol called OAuth.

The site level component, Facebook’s ‘like’ button, adds further functionality using the open graph protocol. If I decide I ‘like’ something while I’m online (it could be anything; music, images, videos, books, products, you name it) I can use Facebook’s universal ‘like’ button and the site will create a connection between me and that object. Best of all, the connection can include semantic data (like type, color, genre, location, etc.) and appears as an object in Facebook with it’s own set of functionality. The communication is not one way either, sites can correspond directly with the subset of users who’ve decided to hit the ‘like’ button.

Here we can start to see the beginnings of what is commonly referred to as the ‘semantic web’. Facebook could become the first search engine that actually ‘understands’ what you’re searching for by leveraging the power of recommendation. It isn’t true “understanding” in terms of artificial intelligence, but it’s far deeper than anything you can currently experience in a Google search to be sure. Of course the biggest beneficiary of open graph in this sense is the marketing industry. Imagine being able to search for real people who like or whose friends like your product. Current targeting methods seem arcane by these standards.

Given this seemingly simple network of intelligent connections, a user can begin to paint a dense profile of themselves online rather than leaving faint traces. What they ‘like’ follows them everywhere, if you account for mobile and augmented reality applications—some already available, some still being developed. Future applications inside this simple idea are limitless. Think game theory, location awareness, point of sale, you can start to see where this road can lead.

Facebook is evolving the online experience here. While broad strokes at first, as the system matures its potential seems limitless.

Adam is an art director from our Calgary office.