Facebook Groups and the Power of ‘Like’

Recently, Facebook made a couple of announcements that give a clear, albeit slightly scary, glimpse into the future of their business model. Facebook debuted a new social feature called Facebook Groups along with enhancements to their plug-ins, and this says quite a bit about the company’s direction.

In an amazingly short time, Facebook has become a standard part of our personal and business lives, both online and offline. Facebook is an “unconditional opt-in,” that is, either you have a Facebook account or you’re an outsider. Just think about all the places that Facebook is located beyond the Facebook.com turf. In fact, it’s hard NOT to find it. It’s used by the news, ads, websites, blogs, comments, pictures, videos, and mobile/tablet apps. Whether by accident or brute force, in less than five years Facebook has gone from nothing to a universal phenomenon with ever-increasing influence.

Along with Facebook’s dominance comes the power (and responsibility) of all that data. Facebook has your personal profile information, including such things as your age, demographics, political and religious affiliation, interests, relationships, the books and music you enjoy – not to mention your entire network of friends and connections spanning six-degrees of separation. With Facebook’s recent announcements, we now can see the true commercialization strategy: a gold mine of social and behavior data.

Via those unconditional opt-in actions and plug-ins, Facebook is able to build a detailed profile on you, based on things you “like,” your comments and opinions, status, location identification, use of time (e.g., how long you spend gaming), shopping habits, travel destinations, and more. Websites, mobile apps, and widgets use the Facebook plug-ins. This has enabled Facebook to be a social repository for tracking and logging your personal information and the aggregate profile of your extraneous group and community. Facebook already knows more about you than your friends and family, and now they will start connecting the dots. They’ll be able to anticipate your destinations, events of interests, related news, and products of interest.

Sure, you could have your cake and eat it too by joining Facebook and never divulging any information about yourself, but it is like being a fan of coffee and never trying Starbucks. It’s everywhere, you break down and give it a try at some point, and then it becomes habitual. It remains to be seen if the massive power of groups and communities will give Facebook the same staying power as the morning cup of Joe.