Team Crowd Factory has been paying attention and discussing the implications and impact of the announcements Facebook made at their F8 Developer Conference; clearly the announcements impact end users, publishers and Social Marketing providers (like us); this post discusses a few points from the point of view of the latter.

We are excited:

Facebook as company, platform and phenomena is exciting for us… there are many reasons why but here a few key ones:

• Facebook numbers make the point for Social; end of discussion.. The question now is: how do you make it work for your business objectives?
• Facebook helps the Social Marketing solution provider ecosystem the way Microsoft help the application developer ecosystem in the early days: provides common services, creates de facto standards, educates and makes it normal for the end users to perform certain type of actions (i.e. Like).
• If the Open Graph becomes widely adopted there will be more data and metadata (relationships among individuals and objects) available and that will result in improved services and capabilities.

We are interested:

Exciting times! What will happen? how will the stakeholders affected by these announcements react?

• The Publisher: will they adopt Open Graph? What data and metadata will they make available and what services and capabilities can we offer to leverage that?
• The End User:  most End Users remain unaware of how much they give in exchange for these services that are considered “free”;  will this be the wake up call to pay more attention? (You may not remember that, but there was a time when people didn’t hesitate to give their social security number for any transaction.. that doesn’t happen anymore).

What are your reactions? We would love to hear from you and talk about this.