Facebook Plots to Make Twitter, Digg, and StumbleUpon Irrelevant
Facebook already reaches into outside websites through Facebook Connect, which gives users a lifeline back to Facebook from the site. But the social network is gearing up to become even more of a presence on the web, if a rumor reported by TechCrunch is correct.
According to TechCrunch, Facebook is working on a "Like" button that users can click on when they see a piece of content on the web that they enjoy. The new button would go beyond the current "Share" button that lets Facebook users link back to content.
TechCrunch is not always accurate, but Jesse Stay, an independent developer who has been poking through the code, confirms that Facebook is working on the function. Some features of the new Like button will probably include options for publishers to add tags and customize their content for Facebook, and for Facebook to actually suck the content into the Facebook website.
The likely purpose is to help users share and spread content according to both their own and their friend's preferences -- whereas the Share button just pushes out a link. The end-game is turning Facebook into a content node around which the rest of the Internet revolves.
As TechCrunch points out, this could be the beginning of a serious challenge to Google:
Good for publishers? Yes. But it's also very, very good for Facebook as hundreds of thousands of websites will rush to format their content to exactly Facebook's preference and send over all their data without a second thought...Of course, Google has a unique function that won't be easy to challenge. There's a set of more vulnerable companies, though, most of them built around the idea of rating and curating content. That includes Digg, Del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon, not to mention Twitter, which is as much for sharing links as anything else.Google spends billions of dollars indexing the web for their search engine. Facebook will get the web to index itself, exclusively for Facebook.
But for the rest of the internet, a push by Facebook to pull in more outside content will probably a good thing, helping to increase traffic and surface quality content that users actually like. We'll find out for sure what Facebook's plans are late next month, at the company's annual f8 developer conference.