The war between Google and Facebook

Facebook’s Open Graph is something I only investigated in the past few days. It has the potential to undermine Google Search’s dominance or if they combine forces allow the web to de facto become Facebook.

This is how it works – a web site operator with a Facebook account tags their pages with special meta tags specifically for Open Graph, including the title, a Description, logo and other information

Details

This glues the web pages to Facebook so that “Like!” activity will post accurate details of your web site on the visitor’s Facebook stream, drawing attention to the web site in a way more powerful than Google Search rankings – which are an educated guess – Liking a web page is a human decision, that when aggregated tell a lot about value of the web site. The days of buying likes from fake accounts is mostly over.

I did set up a new Facebook account for the Streaming Radio Guide a few months ago but haven’t used it in any meaningful way. I’ve decided that I need to add the Open Graph tags here – which doesn’t affect your privacy or the ability of third parties to track what you’re doing.

The reality is that most web sites you might find here already track you via Facebook, a Google Analytics and a bunch of other third party tracking systems – not counting the NSA tracking done from scraping data from the bulk data collection and “man in the middle” techniques to circumvent encryption. The war for individual privacy has been lost. At some point, expect to see the Facebook Like! Button show up here. I surrender.