Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new Facebook development yesterday that will allow the popular social networking site to change the way we experience the web by putting “people at the center of the web”.
 
During Facebook’s f8 conference Zuckerberg introduced the new “Open Graph” system which “lets you shape your experiences online and make them more social”. It does this by pulling information about the websites that you visit, the news stories you like to read and the music that you enjoy listening to and then sharing this info with your Facebook friends.
 
Facebook’s content partners will now be able to access its tools in order to tailor how you experience their sites, based on your list of Facebook friends, favourite bands as well as movies and other info that you have shared on your Facebook profile. According to CNN there is already over 30 companies who have signed up to become Open Graph content partners with Facebook, including themselves, The New York Times, the music site Pandora, Internet Movie Database and ESPN. So when you visit a news site like CNN (while you are logged into Facebook), you’ll be able to see what news stories your Facebook friends liked or recommended. The articles that you recommend or like will also show up in their news feeds on Facebook.
 
This move does raise a number of privacy concerns though, as there’ll be plenty of Facebook users who wouldn’t want this info to be shared with anyone. Zuckerberg said that the only info that’ll be shared is that which you make public on your Facebook profile.
 
“We have redesigned Facebook Platform to offer a simple set of tools that sites around the web can use to personalize experiences and build out the graph of connections people are making,” Zuckerberg explained. “We think that the future of the web will be filled with personalized experiences.”