Went to the Facebook F8 Conference Keynote last night; it was extended into London due to the volcanic ash.

Facebook’s juggernaut just gets bigger & bigger. There were some very powerful platform announcements made, to basically extend themselves over the entire internet, including sucking every page/object on the web into their ecosystem; these explain them much better than I could:

• The Next Evolution of Facebook Platform
• The Graph API

This also raises a few hackles with me, mainly:

• a) the fast disappearance of the Anonymous/Private Web; all sites will know who you are by default and store lots of information about you & your activity, and how it all interrelates.
• b) all this information lives inside Facebooks’ servers, not on the Open Web.

Anyway, somewhat typically paradoxically, I’ve bunged up a couple of Social Plugins on the site as a test (see above & left); they really are just as easy as adding some HTML to your Wordpress templates. ¹ Yes, no-one visits this site, but that’s not the point!! (nerdy rolleyes).

I’m not really bothered about the ‘compelling social experience married with rich metadata’ blahblah on my personal site here, but I would be rather worried if I ran a site heavy with user interaction, like say Lovefilm.com who was a launch partner last night.

They’re already finding themselves having to use Facebook to get some kind of user experience/marketing edge. You know how Windows is slowly, quietly dying, since everyone just does everything through a web browser? Give it a few years, that could be you; Facebook having pretty much hollowed out your entire business model & you’re basically a server farm wrapping around their platform. And Facebook want 25% of your ad revenue.

It was very interesting to see Microsoft playing second fiddle to Facebook as it is…