Facebook and the Donner Party. Is Open Graph the new Hastings’ Cutoff?

The History Channel is running a series called America, The Story of Us and a couple of weeks ago they discussed Manifest Destiny and how the wealthiest people from the eastern states believed they had a right to the land in the west so they sold everything, packed everything and hit the trails west to California. Along the way, a group of 81 reading an old map created by an early emigrant, Lansford W. Hastings that showed a short cut to prosperity. The map was outdated and not tracked and led the Donner Party on a treacherous trail through the Sierra Nevada. The group got to within 30 miles of California but was snowed in by 5 feet of snow and left them trapped and led to cannibalism and the majority of their party dying a very cruel death.

So, why the short history lesson.

The same week that show ran, Facebook announced their “Open Graph” plans which was pushed as a short cut to growing your social graph. All you need to do is add this one line of code and pop these like buttons in where they fit on your site and this will allow seamless socialization for your audience and their friends on all participating sites. They marched out several sites that were early adopters including Yelp, CNN, ESPN and others. Now if your users “like” something on your site, it will alert their friends on Facebook as well as any friends that may happen to your site. This short cut to audience growth is being bought because their is a promise of audience growth for the participating sites. While that audience slowly grows Facebook is using that one line of code to mine key information from your users and advertisers. They will know the habits and trends of your audience and use that as fuel to generate new advertising sales. Facebook will make billions while each of the participating sites try to figure out what they have gained from the partnership and then pray that their is even the slightest potential to monetize it.

So, now reality sets in and you remove the code from your site which in turn, makes your users believe that you have complicated their lives while Facebook makes things easy for them. It seems harder because you will need to rebuild the majority of your registration database which will make users register again.

So, now you have taken the short cut and are now snowed in and the only thing you can do is watch Facebook cannibalize your audience. Remember, they already know they have your friends and their friends playing Farmville, Mafia Wars, Poker and sharing funny anecdotes.  Now through a simple line of code they are getting expense free R&D so they can build out what you have and keep your old audience happy.

My recommendations:

• Create a “like” button of your own and make it post to multiple places — Facebook, Twitter, Buzz and more without giving up your valuable data-points.
• Allow your audience to post the content they feel is valuable enough to the social nets of their choice. It’s not that complicated. Compelling content will make your audience act.

Facebook is a necessary part of the promotion engine. It may be the most important piece of the entire media mix today but just like with traditional media, Google and other forms of web advertising you want to maintain control of your message and audience. Focus more on mobilizing your passionate audience and let them push your message to the right place.

Open Graph is the new Hastings’ Route with one main difference, Lansford W. Hastings didn’t purposely create a map to put others in harms way.

Users have a lot of other concerns. Look at the list of posts just from last week…

A look at last week’s headlines shows the trend:

Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline

Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook
http://gizmodo.com/5530178/top-ten-reasons-you-should-quit-facebook

Yet another Facebook privacy risk: emails Facebook sends leak user IP address
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/07/yet-another-privacy.html

A Stunning Infographic on Facebook’s scary privacy evolution
http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/

Facebook’s “Posts By Everyone” Feature: Do People Realize They’re
Sharing To The World?
http://selnd.com/96avG4

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative | Epicenter |
Wired.com
http://bit.ly/aoNxf0

Senators Call Out Facebook On ‘Instant Personalization’, Other Privacy Issues
http://tcrn.ch/907D27

Facebook’s email days: “I’m CEO bith@#$%!”
http://bit.ly/ba5wRY

Facebook’s new features secretly add apps to your profile
http://bit.ly/bHXpH5

The Day Facebook Stole My Page
http://bit.ly/ar4A4As

Facebook is Dying – Social is Not
http://bit.ly/atwbzX

Facebook’s “Evil Interfaces” | Electronic Frontier Foundation
http://bit.ly/9ww6g3

Today, I read Jason Calacanis’s post The Big Game, Zuckerberg and Overplaying Your Hand where he says –

Zuckerberg represents the best and worst aspects of entrepreneurship.
His drive, skill and fearlessness are only matched by his long
record–recorded in lawsuit after lawsuit–of backstabbing, stealing
and cheating.

As TechCrunch reports that more than 100,000 sites have integrated the Open Graph, it just makes me wonder, at what price?

I also feel very confident that by the end of the week, Foursquare and Facebook will announce some level of partnership. It could be Facebook using Foursquare like they use Oodle or potentially an acquisition. Some say this partnership could be the local endgame but I see it otherwise. Facebook has yet to prove they can get their audience to do much more than play games and share photos and Foursquare was just beginning to make a move. Combine the two along with an integration plan and it leaves a lot of opportunity for other players in the space.

We’ll see!