Sanborn Media Factory

Not to toot our own horn or anything, but, we’re so Cosmo. 

By now most everyone has heard— Facebook was down for (gasp) hours last Thursday. Facebook’s Director of Software Engineering did post a detailed technical description of what went wrong and how it happened here. Besides the obvious backlash of people complaining about not being able to login to check their news feed, Facebook’s service failure reverberated around the web in far more out reaching ways. 

Those “like” buttons, quickly becoming more and more ubiquitous around the web, appearing on some 350,000 sites, disappeared for the duration that facebook.com was down. The API that powers their Open Graph system was also wonky during the time the side was resolving its issues. This means that any site with facebook integration (recommendations, login button, comments, activity feed, facepile, likebox or live stream) wasn’t fully functional during that time. Furthermore, any site that uses facebook connect or a facebook login as its primary or only way to function (think Farmville) was rendered completely useless during the time it was down. 

It’s one thing for Twitter to go down- but for a site like facebook, which people use for their identity and communication as much as email anymore -  to lose functionality for that long has serious implications to businesses.

When you’re running your site and basing some of the main functionality on an independent, third party platform, you must beware that you’ve allowed things to be out of your immediate control. The pluses of using a social network like Facebook for login and enhanced functionality still far outweigh the negatives. But just remember, if problems with those services arise, you have to sit tight and wait for facebook, or whomever else, to smooth them over. No matter how hard you push the closest developer. 

All Things D reported a bit ago that Facebook and Microsoft are discussing agreements to expand their search relationship, giving Bing access to Facebook’s Like data. A potential move that would strengthen the already cohesive business and development ties between the two companies.

Cool!

Social search is an emerging force for web content discovery in unique and personalized ways. We and just about everyone else have been calling this since the likes of Facebook and Twitter were parsing out their streams of data. But…

What about Google?

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated that “The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get information.” Unfortunately, he declined to go into details about those mysterious other ways he mentioned. 

As a mere spectator and web enthusiast this is, pardon my French, fucking awesome. There hasn’t been any real competition for Google since Yahoo! exited the search race (some would argue they weren’t competition even before), and this time the emerging challenger isn’t a clear cut fan favorite. Facebook and Zuck don’t exactly sport the white hats in this fight, but they are going to keep a giant on its toes. I’m going to put the closed versus open, fight for the future of the web argument on the sideline right now. For the time being, this is going to spark a lot of innovation. That makes it better for everyone. At least that’s what capitalism tells us…and this isn’t Russia is it Danny? 

Social optimization specialists and friends of SMF, Gigya, released a whitepaper explaining how the open graph and social search drive traffic, compared to the traditional, hyper-link based search. It breaks online content discovery into three categories: traditional search, feeds, and social network search. 

Most folks in digital media already know how traditional search works. Companies optimize their site for specific keywords in Google searches, banking on the fact that the keywords they choose to represent their site or service will match up with the words people use when searching for those products. 

Traditional search is great because there is strong intent amongst the consumer; they’re actively looking for that particular search item. However, there isn’t much influence in the results— there’s no personal connection, no human element in a search algorithm optimized for and based on keywords. Moreover, the single most prominent links displayed, the sponsored links, are paying for that prime real estate. Unsurprisingly, the current trend shows a shift from traffic driven by search engines to a heavy increase of traffic driven by social networks. 

Social networks love their feeds. Feeds are your homepage on Facebook and Twitter— the streaming updates from friends or people that you follow in your social network. They are full of links and content that the people with whom you have an online connection are posting. They’re filled with content because people just happen to have this burning desire to share the best and newest content with each other. People love to share (who knew!). On the graph above, feeds lie directly opposite from traditional search. Feeds have lots of influence because the content is posted by people you know (or in Twitter’s case, people you wish you knew) represented by their very name and picture. People care about the content they post, people want their posts to be commented and retweeted, they strive for their discovery to be apprised by their peers. The very nature of feeds and showing off cool stuff is what powers “web 2.0” and gives feeds its inimitable influence. But when the user scans over a feed, intent is lacking — people aren’t necessarily searching for the content that is being pushed to them. This begs the question: When we want to find something in a feed, how do we sift through all the cat pictures, engagement announcements, philosophical venting, etc. and find the important and relevant updates?

Enter Facebook’s Open Graph. Facebook gave everything in their social graph a unique ID, essentially making everything an easy to find “social object.” EVERYTHING that is connected to Facebook is a social object. You are an object, your favorite football team’s page is an object, your alumni group is an object. With the introduction of the “like” button, Facebook gave publishers a way to include items that don’t live within facebook.com. So…now your website is an object, a specific post is an object, and even a specific comment is an object. When all these objects are organized in one, big standard way it allows for someone (Facebook) to create a search that looks through all those social objects and return results that are based off both search terms and social connections. 

Thus, the third means of driving traffic: the social search. It’s a search that scours the social networks and the rest of the web, aiming to provide the most relevant, personalized discovery of content. The results yielded are social objects that are tightly connected to you, based on your social graph: your collection of friends and your friends’ friends, and their information/likes/tweets etc.

It is the most intriguing because it constitutes high intent—the searcher is actively looking the item up— as well as high influence because the primary results are going to be things that engage you, found in the open graph. They’re things that you or your friends like or tweet or post or comment on, not sponsored results (yet). 

The way to optimize your own content or product or service in a social search is to actively create social objects and contribute to the graph. A facebook “like page” isn’t by any means the only way to create a social object around something. Including proper metadata in the html of a webpage that allows it to be indexed by search engines and define it as its own social object is a start. In a recent blog post, Dare Obasanjo does an excellent job outlying the technical ways tags can be applied to social objects and further explaining the idea of the open graph.

This whole thing is new and more or less up for grabs. Facebook took the lead in figuring out what to do with their large pool of personal data. However, all the players realize the changes going on right now and are putting a lot of weight into figuring out the best ways to push this movement forward. It’s organizing and connecting the web in a new way, which is very exciting. At least for geeks like us. 

“Facebook will become the most popular site on the Internet, toppling Google.com, unless something drastic happens in the next few years.” 

Bold words. Using data from ComScore, Business Insider plotted the unique visits to google.com and facebook.com and produced this graph. Would it surprise you if Facebook does eventually surpass Google in internet dominance?

Former Facebook President Sean Parker candidly discusses the horse race among social networks in their infancy and divulges his opinion that Facebook should have never won, Friendster and MySpace blew it.

Tom Coates in this interesting article on Google’s future. Interesting read, but if you are short on time, just skip to the summary in the last two paragraphs. 

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/29/google-the-search-party-is-over/#com-head

Visualizations at Facebook Developer Conference