Mark Zuckerberg the 26-year-old CEO of the phenomenally successful Facebook coined the phrase social graph; people and the connections they have to everything they care about. The Facebook social graph integrates within your website, mobile applications and applications on Facebook itself. It helps you drive growth and engagement by personalizing the experience for your users and letting them share the experience with the important people in their lives. A few examples of the Facebook social graph in action are:
Modern messaging system, the end of email?
It not another email system and again plays heavily on social offering seamless messaging, conversation history and the all important social inbox. The Social Inbox filters exactly the messages you want to see and divides incoming messages into three key categories:
Messages. This is messages from friends and their friends. People you care about and who want to regularly engage with you.
Other. This is the day-to-day mundane tasks. Paying bills, dealing with finance, ordering goods and services, etc.
Junk. Spam filter.
Social Plugins
Integrating Facebook into your website using the social plugin Like Box. This enables users to like your Facebook Business Page and view its stream directly from your website.
Zynga Social Gaming
A gaming company founded by Mark Pincus in 2007, employing over 1200 people with a turnover of $600 million. They turned gaming into social gaming. It’s you and your friends that build a farm or run a cafe, etc and get involved in the social inter action. This makes for very compelling content.
Spotify Social Music
A music streaming service founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon and launched for public access in October 2008. Making music social by providing Facebook friend’s playlists that they have made public. Just subscribe to your friend’s public play lists and play them as if they were your own. It’s a great way to discover music from your friends.
Photos Going Social
Photos are one of Facebook’s strengths. It was the start of the phenomenal effect integrating social can have on a product. It was not high-resolution or ease of use that made Facebook photos successful. It is socializing photos by tagging. People want to know who is in the photo. A simple concept, but pure genius.
What do you think?
Is this the end of email?
How will this change the way we communicate?
Are we only seeing the start of social integration?
What does the social graph mean to you?
I would love to hear your views.
Please leave a comment.
Credit Image: Coopératique
Very succinctly put Bill. I think you’re right – but I think that Facebook will also replace websites especially with all the plug ins available including stores and page branding. FB has the added advantage of transparency – false claims or overstatements can easily be decried and praise left by others is more credible.
Looking forward to reading more of your blogs – saw this one posted on The Business Bulletin.
Ann
Hi Ann,
Thanks for your comments. Facebook may indeed replace websites. My concern is that I don’t own my Facebook page in as much that it is a free service and Facebook can remove it at will, though unlikely to happen. I also feel constrained somewhat by Facebook’s rules and site layout.
However their social graph blows me away and I share their vision of the future.
I may experiment and try running without a website for 6 months.