

Ask HN: What are your thoughts on Facebook's Open Graph concept? - slindstr

Did anyone watch the F8 keynote today?  I think the "Like" buttons are alright and the social bar will be annoying, but Open Graph has a lot of potential to do some amazing things.  I'm not sure how I feel about Facebook being the hub of all this information, but I guess if they weren't then Google or somebody else would, which isn't to say that this won't eventually happen.<p>Are you planning on integrating Facebook's new offerings in the immediate future in your product?    What are your thoughts?
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sekou
Maybe I'm being paranoid, but I just don't trust Facebook with the internet.

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collint
The only truly new and interesting thing about this is how big Facebook is.

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primemod3
I just added Facebook's "Like button" to one of my sites, it was surprisingly
easy to do. You can see it in action here:
<http://www.peoplemarks.com/BruceLee>

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korch
I think open graph is going to be a bitter poison pill for Facebook, and once
they see what users actually do with it they will have no choice but to
cripple it. Though I'm glad to finally see Brad Fitzpatrick's open graph idea
from years ago on Livejournal come to fruition.

Tucked away in the announcements was a policy change to allow 3rd parties to
now store Facebook user data for more than 24 hours. Facebook now wants every
web site to embed their widgets, so to do that, they have to make their data
freely available. Facebook might be a far better walled garden than AOL ever
was, a truly wondrous Hanging Gardens of Babylon; but open graph turns them
inside out.

Now what's to stop the rest of the web from just looting all of Facebook's
data?

Some will argue that this is a similar pattern to being indexed by
Google—trying to lock down content backfires, because if you give it away, the
traffic Google brings you more than makes up for whatever you lost. So too for
Facebook—they get more traffic back by giving away data compared to forcing
everyone to facebook.com.

Everybody knows Facebook will become the next Myspace(Friendster, yadda,
yadda), even if nobody knows quite how it's going to happen. (Kind of like how
everybody knew the housing market was in a bubble, yet kept playing it up.)
Blowing open the gates on data sharing is going to hurt Facebook more in the
long term, because it opens up new opportunities to leverage user data across
the whole web ecosystem in ways which Facebook cannot control. It's inevitable
that someone is going to build a popular service on top of Facebook's user
data; structued in such a way that Facebook itself couldn't clone it
internally without compromising their other products and partners. While this
itself is great for users and the whole web, it's not going to be so great for
Facebook.

