Facebook vs. Google

Facebook recently articulated its vision of the future of the internet. These are detailed by
Venture Beat here. The key part of its vision is centered on a people-centric internet, and its underpinning seems to be a social graph--where Facebook maps out the relationships of its 400MN + users, including likes and dislikes.

As Zuckerberg explained:

“The web is at a really important turning point right now. Up until recently, the default on the web has been that most things aren’t social and most things don’t use your real identity. We’re building toward a web where the default is social. Every application will be designed from the ground up to use real identity and friends.”

And Venture Beat reports:

The core of Facebook’s big f8 conference today is centered around the idea of an Open Graph, a map of people’s relationships and their connections to all objects and content on the Web. That means Facebook can not only map who you’re friends with, but it and other applications interacting with the social network can also graph the restaurants, books, movies, news articles and cities you like.

The company is positioning this Open Graph as a fundamentally different way of thinking about the Web compared to how Google has mapped it via hyperlinks over the past decade. And it’s a big trend that’s emerged from the last two weeks of major product announcements from Twitter and Facebook — namely, how do you organize this mass of real-time behavior and sharing by content type and display it in a social context?

That’s more sophisticated than status updates and simple media sharing. When you “like” or post a status update about a band, Facebook and Twitter want to know in a structured way that you might be referring to your favorite music group. They don’t want to scrape it from imprecise language in a status update.