Piffey

The web has a history of evolving. In under a decade it has gone from ‘The Information Superhighway’ to ‘teh intarweb’. We’ve seen communication trends move from the old BBSes to Usenet, IRC, forums, Wikis and other user-generated websites, MySpace, and now to Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets. With the evolution of the modern search engine the Internet’s vast array of information has become cataloged and organized for any layman with the mind to search it – or feel lucky about for that matter.

As Facebook eclipses Google as the web’s most visited website we are seeing a change in Internet trends once again. No longer will people be searching for news, but rather it will be passed to them based upon their social network. The web’s vast tags and catalogs were once used to enhance search engine use, but soon these will be replaced by tags from your social network. At least, this is the idea of Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.

At the F8 developer conference, Zuckerberg has been hyping the advantages of designing the web for use with your friends and social network — essentially looking at making Facebook the portal for the rest of the web. The idea is to personalize th web with ‘Like’ buttons that would cover all content on a web page from pictures, video, and text. The web could then cater to an individual based upon what their friend’s liked, essentially improving everyone’s Internet experience.

The Internet has always moved toward making itself more user friendly, but this catering would make your social activity on the web just as important to the acquisition of information as your actual ability to search through non-manipulated search results.This has its advantages on the surface, but a major downside when exploring a bit deeper.

Many have said that the major problem with the Internet is its move toward independent social groups and the shrinking niche market of sub-cultures. Always hearing a single side’s news makes it impossible to understand your dissenting neighbor and therefore intolerant of their ideals. Many say this could eventually cause a greater upset or even violence due to a lack of tolerance and understanding.

The other disadvantage comes with the amount of data Facebook can then accumulate and sell on its users. Privacy concerns are always present on this blog so there is no need to reiterate the obvious, but there is no limit to what can be breached with mounds of personal preference data. If users can be tracked down with ‘anonymized’ Google searches then preference data could easily pinpoint a users political standing or be utilized to falsely accuse someone of certain leanings because of their daily reads.

Lastly is the obvious battle this builds between Google and Facebook. If Facebook really wants to be the portal to the web then a more social Internet would create an advantage for them. There is no way that Google could jump into the social network game now. Facebook has over four-hundred million users with seventy percent of those residing outside the United States — Google couldn’t hope to compete with a social network that is already that huge. We could see a major shift in the evolution of the Internet and how it is used.

A lot of people fear government takeover and censorship of the Internet. In reality we won’t need their help since we are going to censor it ourselves and dump all of our trust into a single, centralized entity in the end.