Is your site FACEBOOKed?

I'm back after a brief hiatus, extended a little more since a recent development brought out the techie in me (which I wrongly thought was put to rest the day I joined IIM Indore). Guess the signs are visible on my blog :-)

Yes, social networking is evolving fast and Facebook is defining the rules of the game. Facebook hosted its developers conference f8 on 21st April 2010, at San Francisco. The highly anticipated event was followed worldwide by social networking enthusiasts, who eagerly watched trends, strategies and technology being discussed.

'Instantly social and personalized experiences everywhere' has been the mantra for Mark Zuckerburg in his keynote, which perfectly aligns with the new offerings from Facebook - Social Plugins and Open Graph Protocol. This can potentially bind together the biggest social network in the world and a plethora of businesses aiming to offer their customers an interactive experience, thereby leading to a social graph of gigantic proportions. San Francisco based denim maker, Levi's has been among the first businesses to take advantage of Facebook's new plugins.

In the pipeline are exciting innovations like an 'Instant Personalization' capability for third party websites which will pull out information from user profiles on Facebook. The third party sites would be allowed to store user-data indefinitely. Concerns over privacy have cropped up immediately. Ian Paul's blog on PC World provides an in-depth insight into the privacy issue, its fallout and ways to tackle it.

All said, the innumerable 'like' buttons and a FACEBOOKed cyber world are here to stay. If you really liked this blog post from me, spare a moment to click the 'Like' button below.