Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the company’s F8 developer conference on Wednesday to unveil what he said is “the most transformative thing we’ve ever done for the Web.” It’s called the Open Graph.
Facebook has 400M users. Facebook Mobile hit the 100 million user mark after about three years, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg, faster than Facebook.com proper but slower than the more recently launched Facebook Connect. Connect integrates the social network with external websites and apps, and it only took 15 months to hit the 100 million user milestone.
That means that if you’re building a website, most of your users are probably Facebook users too, Zuckerberg said: “And if they’re not, they probably will be soon.”
Facebook lets users add friends and send them messages, update personal profiles and notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by workplace, school, or college.
Facebook Connect is a set of APIs from Facebook that enable Facebook members to log onto third-party websites, applications, mobile devices and gaming systems with their Facebook identity. While logged in, users can connect with friends via these mediums and post information and updates to their Facebook profile.
C/Net explains how Facebook plans to connect disparate corners of the Web with Open Graph. “Yelp is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to small businesses. Pandora is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to music,” Zuckerberg said. “If we can take these separate maps of the graph and pull them all together, then we can create a Web that’s smarter, more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware.”
Meta data is the way developers will get data into Facebook’s semantic search engine, which is based on the company’s “Open Graph”.
While the concept of the semantic web has been around for years, there are very few companies who have a shot at building a semantic search engine. Companies like Adaptive Blue and Thetus Publisher have implement sematic web applications but none of them have the scale that Facebook has.
BlogRunner has more on the Facebook announcement.
