reports that Facebook has “won” the web are laughable, especially given the numbers Google put up this month, with more than $6 billion in revenue over the first 3 months of the year. Moreover, the bulk of Google’s ad revenue comes from “contextual” ads, which rely on the contents of a web page or search query. It’s far from clear that targeted ads — even ones based on deep profiles — would do better than the ads on Google’s search page, even if Facebook eventually thinks it can build a search engine whose rankings are set via the data it collects from users.
Facebook built much of this easy-to-use system on “open” standards, as WebMonkey’s Michael Calore reports, even as it sucks the data into a closed community. But those standards are used almost exclusively by Facebook, and ignore the work that’s been done by others to create universally understandable meta-data.
Moreover, the Like button feeds exclusively to Facebook. If your primary identity on the net is at LinkedIn or Google or MySpace or god forbid, on your own domain, this button does you no good. Facebook didn’t build this architecture to make the net better, it built it to make Facebook money.
You can opt out of some of this through Facebook’s increasingly arcane privacy settings, though most won’t do anything to stop Facebook’s relentless push to make people’s profiles public.
via wired.com