Most regular Facebook users will have seen the recent notifications when logged in, regarding adding pages and events as ‘likes’. This is a form of social bookmarking that has been used in SEO and social networking for many years, but Facebook are saying that their system will work not only differently, but better.
The ‘like’ something system in Facebook will start to create clusters of data, about anything from websites to car dealerships, football clubs or hotels. As people are ‘liking’ more and more content, it will begin to create a directory of popular products and services.Over time this will provide enough data (Facebook hope and plan it will) to create a sort of search engine based on popularity. Whether this will be based on Facebook itself, or launched on a new website platform remains to disclosed.
Instead of indexing all content online, this kind of directory will only be based on what people like. This removes the spam and black hat element of search results, like affiliate websites and information sites that don’t really perform.
Because every ‘like’ for each individual product, info portal or service will have users attached to it, this will also create a theme for users. Trends will set by certain demographics and socio economic factors, meaning Facebook will be able to target users with potentially relevant data.
There are rumours that this smart kind of information graph will be more accurate and return better results when it’s had enough time to mature. We see this as being a long way off. I for example, saw the suggested ‘likes’ on my Facebook profile last week, and instantly got annoyed and blocked them out. Whether this kind of information gathering will be taken as an invation of privacy will unfold in the coming years.
