How Does the 2011 Facebook Open Graph Change Affect You as a User?

At the 2011 Facebook F8 Developers Conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced a major upgrade to to their Open Graph API. To most users of Facebook, this might not mean much. It probably doesn’t sound like English. But today’s techie announcement will greatly affect all Facebook users, from you to your grandmother. Let me tell you why.

A little history will help explain what is going on. In the old days (3 years ago) the only information captured about you was that you were friends with someone. Then last year, Facebook allowed you to say that you Like someone or something.

With this release of the Facebook Open Graph in late 2011, you don’t have to say that you Like someone or something. Now you can just say what you’re doing! Later this year, you won’t have to Like things anymore to have them show up on your friends’ Walls. Instead, you simply tell Facebook what you’re doing using verbs and nouns.

These types of updates will then be reflected in the right hand column of the screen that is now called the Ticker. Like a stock ticker, things that your friends are doing will scroll by for you to see. To see more information about the Ticker or to interact with it, you simply hover over the entry and a popup will display more details. One example Mark showed was related to listening to songs. One of his friends was listening to a song and he was able to listen to the same song simply by clicking on that items in the Ticker. Pretty cool!

Now the important point. How does this change affect your personal Facebook experience and privacy? The answer is simply, more of your world will now be exposed on your Facebook page and with your friends. Let’s look at an example of why.

Today, you can go to an E-commerce site like rei.com and click the Facebook Like button. You have to do this action in order for the web page to be displayed on your Wall and available for your friends to see. However with the new Open Graph API, website developers can now include a one-time access popup that will allow all future actions you take on the site to be posted to your Ticker or Wall.

Once you approve access the first time, you will most likely forget that you did that and from then on, the website can pass information into Facebook without you knowing it. And it can be anything. It can show you’re looking at a camping tent on the REI website, it can say you commented on the long underwear and so on. This can get scary.

So as usual with Facebook, additional ‘features’ comes with the inclusion of less privacy. So get ready for everyone to know when you’re shopping at Victoria Secret online or watching a video that is not fit for public viewing.

I will post another article about how the new Open Graph API will greatly benefit marketers and advertisers. Share your thoughts below.