If anyone can do it...
But that is only one side of it. As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stated: "The power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken." And for every worried whisper and blogged concern, there have been just as many praising Facebook for trying to lead the Internet into a new stage of development.
Ian Schafer, Editor of Adage.com said: "Imagine visiting Pandora and it already knows how to program your station. Or visiting CNN and having it know what kind of news to display for you. As a consumer, there are potentially many benefits of the initiative, making many experiences you have more and more relevant the more interactions you perform."
Facebook assures us that the graph will use non-personally identifiable data, but there are still concerns on privacy issues, an area that Facebook has a far from spotless record. Never the less, big businesses are leaping on board the ever growing Facebook wagon will increases alacrity. The promised one stop access to Facebook's 400 million plus users has advertisers and promoters drooling over their key boards.
Chris Nutall of the Financial Times wrote: "Facebook has every chance of success because website owners have every incentive to adopt its protocols - with more than 400m users, Facebook can drive tremendous traffic to their properties."
This combined with the recently popular Facebook Credits, the world famous website may soon have the first workable Internet currency, something only dreamed of previously. Yet there are doubts voiced not only of Facebook's trustworthiness, but its ability to totally dominate the ever fluid medium that is the internet.
Blogger Fred Wilson wrote: "I am not sure if Facebook's ambition is to create the one social graph to rule them all but if it is, I don't think they will succeed with that. If it is to empower the creation of many social graphs for various activities and to be in the centre of that activity and driving it, I think they are already there and will continue to be there for many years to come."
There are a hundred questions being asked online, and a thousand theories abound. But there is some consensus: if anyone can make such a fundamental leap in how the Internet works, then right now that group is the Facebook development team.
