How Facebook is Eating the Internet

Facebook for college admissions: Facebook is eating the internet

Facebook is, unbelieveably, growing faster than ever. Fast facts from Techcrunch.

Facebook is approaching 500 million users and is growing faster than ever.
Just a year after launch, Facebook Connect is by far the most popular form of Open ID, with over 100 million users.
The average Facebook user logs in 11 times a month, up from 8 a year ago.
7.5% of all time on the internet is spent on Facebook, at 135 billion minutes.

So, Inigral was at f8, the Facebook Developer Conference, and my friends previous assessment that “Facebook is Eating the Internet” finally became a reality. Here’s how they’re doing it:

They’re eating Wikipedia by using Community Pages from user interests and memberships…. Because this will have great traffic and SEO they will become top search results for a dramatically large number of search terms.

Facebook's Community Page for "Liking," featuring Wikipedia integration

They’re eating Search by launching the Open Graph API and Social Plugins. Social Plugins with the like button are already rapidly indexing everything (in a crowdsourced way) into Facebook search. The Open Graph API will allow third party developers to put items into Facebook’s search index (plus much more).

So, Facebook already owns social networking/peer-to-peer communication on the web and mobile devices. They tried to eat listings/marketplace. Now, they’re trying to eat SEO’d information resource pages and search at the same time.

Oh, and they’re going to eat your email, too.

Should be fun to watch, at the very least.