In my last post I talked about Facebook’s integration of “Places” and how it changed (or doesn’t) the social media landscape.
The tale of Facebook’s late, well-planned, and well-executed entrance to the geo-location space followed by Foursquare’s and Gowalla’s single-file submission to Facebook’s geo-location system reveals what Facebook has become. It is no longer the social networking website that once competed with other social media websites such as MySpace. In fact, Facebook is no longer primarily a social network at all. Facebook is now a new entity entirely which is defined by it’s social graph and the open graph protocol, a mechanism it has created by which your online behavioral information is collected, analyzed, and a platform upon which to integrate and apply those analyses into business strategy and political policy. This new Facebook has no viable competition and the anti-trust lawyers have yet to catch on.
While Facebook has extended its influence to other sites outside its proverbial walls, it has also been developing an internal economy. This economy is based upon social apps. Places has successfully positioned Facebook to be at the center of the mobile commerce and mobile gaming revolutions further securing Facebook’s position as the primary social development platform for at least the next decade. Facebook will be connecting people to people, places, and businesses both online and in the real world. The convergence of smart phone technology, geo-location, and Facebook’s open graph platform will allow the creation of a new dimension by which we understand and interact with the physical world in ways previously unimagined.
