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Sorry, but I don't see things playing out in this way. "It means it has access to all of the things your friends are doing right now and ever. And it also mean

Sorry, but I don't see things playing out in this way. "It means it has access to all of the things your friends are doing right now and ever. And it also means it has access to all physical and virtual entities connected to you. The music you've played, the photos you've viewed, the videos you've watched, tracking all these things are possible today." In terms of friends' activities, Facebook only has access to what people voluntarily post to it. And in my experience, only a small percentage of my "Facebook friends" actually post regularly about their activities. Moreover, that number seems to be going down, as though my friends have been using Facebook less as the years go by. Whether that's just because these people are getting older, or whether Facebook usage really is decreasing across all users, I don't know. Sure, Facebook can see and analyze which Facebook photos you've looked at, but why is this particularly interesting? It's just a bunch of people dancing at bars, or maybe a few family vacation shots, at least in my experience. For videos, most videos people watch are on Youtube, not Facebook. So +1 for Google in that case (although I also don't see how this fits into the master plan you are describing). And for music, well, Facebook doesn't see what music I listen to. I don't list it in my profile, nor do I use Spotify or another Facebook-connected music program. I suspect most others are the same, as I don't see much music related stuff in my news feed. I don't see this changing in the future (and I even suspect that Spotify has come to view mandatory Facebook authentication as a mistake). "...they will be more integrated into the fabric of our lives than any other business I can imagine. More than banking, more than the utility companies, more than any retailers wet dream." This is ridiculous. Even if a majority of businesses were to use Facebook to authenticate and track users, they are under no obligation to send this data back to Facebook (and, through Facebook, to other companies--possibly competitors--also connected to Facebook). The best Facebook could hope to do is impose a fee for using their authentication, and since they aren't doing this now I doubt they would ever. Businesses just won't accede to sharing their information back to Facebook to the extent you think they will. They have no reason to, and plenty of reasons not to. The only things they will share are items users have specifically authorized them to post into their feeds[1], and based on my Facebook experience, those things are relatively few and far between (almost all of my feed is just status updates expressing an opinion or thought, or picture uploads). [1] with the possible exception of spammy "social" games, which seem to find ways to post things even if players didn't really want them to -- but such spammy updates will only further drive people away from Facebook in the long run

gfodor 14y ago
The point is that eventually all businesses are going to have to integrate with Facebook if they want to compete. And, as part of that integration, data will be flowing back into Facebook. The more data that flows back, the more those businesses can extend the capabilities of their app in novel ways. Right now things are incredibly primitive. Pictures at bars on the surface seem useless, but we're living in an era where machine learning and machine vision can extract tons of information out of those photos and that behavior. All it takes are a few nuggets of facts about a person that cannot be ascertained otherwise and Facebook has an unfair advantage as soon as people learn how to apply those facts in a way that puts them at an advantage. I would not look to the status quo as an indicator of how this is all going to tie together. You and I are not going to be part of this, most likey, we are too old. Facebook hasn't even created a phone yet. Once they have hardware out in the field that is Facebook-enabled things are going to change rapidly since those devices are going to make non-Facebook devices look braindead, even today.

gfodor 14y ago

The point is that eventually all businesses are going to have to integrate with Facebook if they want to compete. And, as part of that integration, data will be flowing back into Facebook. The more data that flows back, the more those businesses can extend the capabilities of their app in novel ways. Right now things are incredibly primitive. Pictures at bars on the surface seem useless, but we're living in an era where machine learning and machine vision can extract tons of information out of those photos and that behavior. All it takes are a few nuggets of facts about a person that cannot be ascertained otherwise and Facebook has an unfair advantage as soon as people learn how to apply those facts in a way that puts them at an advantage. I would not look to the status quo as an indicator of how this is all going to tie together. You and I are not going to be part of this, most likey, we are too old. Facebook hasn't even created a phone yet. Once they have hardware out in the field that is Facebook-enabled things are going to change rapidly since those devices are going to make non-Facebook devices look braindead, even today.