Watching Mark Zuckerberg deliver the keynote speech at last week's F8 Conference was an uncomfortable experience. Not least because my innate British sense of embarrassment found the whole 'cool geek' thing cringeworthy in the extreme. The high-five 'tag-team' handovers were particularly disturbing and self conscious...
Presentation aside, however, this was an extremely important speech. The man who has 400million Facebook users and their data in the palm of his hand is ambitious. He has a plan to weave Facebook so tightly into every aspect of our web experience that it becomes impossible to challenge its market position. We are entering the age of the digital monopoly - Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter are becoming ever more dominant forces in their fields pushing other services aside as they grow ubiquitous - and hence essential. Is it wrong that such firms should be able to erect ever higher barriers to entry in their industries? Should access to (and control of) the personal data of so many be trusted to commercial organisations? Am I being paranoid?
As individuals we give information about the things that make us who we are, freely, in exchange for the ability to participate in the conversation, the privilege of connecting with 'the network' the sense of belonging. But are we always fully aware of the implications of evealing so much of ourselves to the digital world?
Over the coming weeks and months you will begin to see 'like' buttons appear on all manner of web sites. You will also see your friends faces appearing on these web pages. What facebook's opengraph means is that whenever a friend of yours clicks a 'like' button on a web site that has included the (very simple, very developer-friendly) piece of code that Facebook provides - you will see their face on the web pages they like. Equally, if you click 'like' on a page your profile picture will appear. This data about who and what you like will be public and available. So should you be worried?
You do, of course, have the option not to participate, but the very simplicity of the the system and the sense that 'everybody's doing it so it must be ok' is likely to encourage many Facebook users to simply see it as an extension of their facebook profile.
I predict a swift and wide-reaching uptake of the opengraph. Why? Because Facebook have certainly got one thing right - they've made it easy for us to participate. Quick and simple to use, the like button doesn't interfere with our browsing experience and it plays upon our eagerness to define ourselves within an online community by our preferences. Plus it's oh so simple for even the novice web page creator to apply - for those marketers amongst you, that's a tick for both pull and push strategies...
Great work Facebook - as a marketer I think you've got a winning strategy. As a human being and socialweb user, however, I admit I'm concerned. My fear of having my real identity replaced by an online construct may seem far fetched - and I have to admit that this has been fuelled by reading Jaron Larnier's You are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, a frightening treatise on the erosion of humanity through increasingly restrictive technology.
The bottom line? I don't know what the future holds but from here it looks as though the online environment will be dominated by a few California corporations and the group of extraordinarily intelligent (and predominantly white male) executives who run them. Are these our elected leaders? Are these the right people to shape human society in the 21st Century? Has the world even noticed the sheer weight of power we have gifted them? I fear not.
My advice to you? Think it through before hitting the 'like' button...
Watch Mark Zuckerberg's Keynote here: http://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/
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