Facebook in action : a democratic web

There’s been a fair bit of chatter around the  new changes to Facebook from the conference last week. One of the most interesting developments is clearly Facebook’s desire to be a complete web experience. If this doesn’t sit up and make you take notice, well, it should. To get an idea of the power of Facebook’s new ‘Like’ button, which can be added onto  your site, check out the video below.

While it’s evident from this video that Facebook are achieving a more social web, a semantic web, I think that what they’ve actually done is to go one better than that : they’ve created a democratic web.

Power in the hands of user

Where social media has for a fairly long time now given power to the user, a voice to the minority, this is yet to impact in a way that I would have liked to see, where a company’s website becomes a complete social experience. Up until now, the ‘voice’ of the user has been kept within the confines of the appropriate set channels. Unless you are a well known candy brand who decided to turn their homepage into a tweet stream for example. Facebook is changing that. They’re implementing a more connected web – a unifying social experience where you community and entire social make-up travels with you from one site to the next. This is no small feat – it is a huge development.

Think about it for a minute. Typically Levis, or any company would have had the power to serve you up pretty much anything they wanted. They set the agenda for your experience on their website. You didn’t like it? Fine, you could tweet about it, give it a bad review or join an ‘anti-corporation X’ page as a form of protest. Whether you liked or disliked whatever experience you had on a company’s website, there was little you could do about it. What Levis have done, is turn that completely on its head. No longer do you just go to their defined categories and trawl through the jeans on selection. No, they’ve introduced the Friends store, where you can see the selections that your friends have made, what content they’ve ‘Liked’. Or you can view all their products by how many ‘Likes’ they have. Hats off to Levis for this. This is a fantastic move and paves the way for an incredibly exciting web experience. A democratic web experience where the user is all-controlling.

The dislike button

The obvious question one might have is – where is the dislike button? It’s one thing for Facebook to introduce a like function and allow a website to tailor their content around likes and recommendations, but what about the dislike button? This then presents a bigger challenges to companies. Can you really trust your own web presence enough to introduce a dislike button? My guess is that 99% of companies won’t, which is probably why you won’t see this from Facebook. At the moment their new functionality is encouraging companies to send free traffic through to Facebook and hand over their data capture to the site while they’re at it. If you make this in any way a bad experience for the organisation, they’ll just take the button off. Sure, you can hardly call it a democratic web if all you’re really fostering is happiness or endorsements, but that shouldn’t undermine the steps that Facebook have taken to make a social experience out of pretty much any site.

Either way (and I’m on the fence about whether I’d actually like a dislike button), it is an incredibly exciting advancement in the evolution of our social web experience. Again, when Facebook is becoming such an intrinsic part of the fabric of the web, it’s hard to see how they can be challenged on this. At the moment Facebook is King, and given the changes they’re making to the site, I’d say they deserve to be.