As we’ve been saying for some time now (here, here, here), the web is becoming more social everyday. More sites are using social plugins to help visitors share information, with the popularity of networks like Facebook and Twitter driving this transition by connecting friends and peers in real-time.
Today, Facebook launched a number of products that echo our belief that, as their CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it, “We’re building towards a web where the default is social. Every application and product will be designed from the ground up to use real identity and friends.”
Two products Facebook announced that aim towards this goal are the social plugins “Like” and “Social Bar.” The Like social plugin allows sites to implement the Facebook “like” button anywhere on their site, so Facebook users can “like” a particular piece of content (e.g., a movie on IMDb, a news story on CNN or a song on Pandora) and broadcast it to their friends. The other plugin, Social Bar, is similar to our ShopTogether toolbar (although without co-browsing capability), and allows users to view their news stream and chat with other Facebook friends on a partner site.
While these tools will enable many sites to quickly create a social community with few development resources, there are a number of big concerns for brands thinking about integrating the Facebook products. According to Jeremiah Owyang, analyst at Altimeter Group:
- “..Beware, by allowing Facebook to be the primary login, this reduces the traditional way of capturing leads and populating your database. Secondly, by doing this once, you’re setting the promise that Facebook will always be part of our corporate experience.
- …Facebook’s core conundrum is they’ve made the promise to their users to keep the experience private and closed. Expect continued scrutiny over privacy as Facebook struggles to go open to compete with Google, dragging along users to be more public every step of the way. Facebook’s battles are both external as well as internal.”
In addition to these concerns, sites that implement the Facebook social bar are blocking the ability for users to easily connect to other networks that may share popularity among their customers, including Twitter, MySpace and others.
In spite of these issues, we share Facebook’s vision of the social web and are excited to see how this pushes more companies to take a closer look at collaboration technologies like ours.
For more on Facebook’s news, check out the synopsis from Jeremiah Owyang here.
Tags: collaboration, e-commerce, f8, facebook, s-commerce, ShopTogether, social bar, social plugins, social shopping