Facebook is trying to be the new Wikipedia.

Lately there’s been a lot of privacy backlash over Facebook making a lot of information public by default. But one question that’s getting lost in the controversy deserves more attention. Why are they doing it?

I was lucky enough to be at a semantic web conference just after Facebook unleashed its new Graph API. What Facebook has done, for those who aren’t familiar, is changed Facebook interests and “likes” into links. So now, instead of having a list of movies and hobbies you like, your profile now links to pages for Cooking and The Godfather.

These pages are wrappers of the same information that was on Wikipedia, IMDB and elsewhere, but with likes and wall posts added. If you click on some of the Wikipedia links, you’ll get taken not to Wikipedia, but to another Facebook page that wraps it. Facebook may be using Wikipedia’s content, but the experience and the information is controlled by Facebook and stays on facebook.com.

Facebook isn’t interested in (just) becoming an encyclopedia of things, though. Facebook is interested in becoming an encyclopedia of you. All of your interests and likes are now linked, via FB, to wrapper pages that Facebook manages. Facebook is the centralized database that stores all that information.

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Is having an open graph everywhere inevitable?

At the same time that Facebook was transforming their site into a database of everyone, a group of four NYU college students got a writeup from the New York Times. Their project, called Diaspora, was (is) to make your personal encyclopedia entry private, so you can control your information and how it gets accessed.

But while people donated nearly 200 thousand dollars to their project, and much ink was spilled over how much Facebook was now sharing about us, one might argue that the change to a public graph a la Facebook is inevitable. After all:

• Many, some at Facebook, some elsewhere, have argued that privacy is less important to members of Generation Y.
• Plus, having a shared social graph is clearly better than one where you can’t see any of the nodes, right? Once we see how useful it is to share the music we like and the news we’re interested in through the graph, we won’t want to turn back.

There are two forces that will decide this future: developers and you, the user.

Developers matter

You may have noticed recently that a huge number of sites – CNN, Pandora, the New York Times and others – have started spouting Facebook like buttons. Some other sites have included ways to login using Facebook itself, making you verify your identity by using your Facebook information.

Websites do this because it makes things easier. People are (arguably) more likely to login to CNN using Facebook than entering their email address, setting yet another password that could be forgotten, and checking their email for some confirmation link they have to click on. The added convenience makes it worth it to connect CNN to your real name and identity. For some people at least.

Web developers are the key to this, because we end up building the technology that decides if our sites are linked through Facebook or not. And, frankly: There are few good alternatives to Facebook.

For login, there are simply no sites that have the coverage of Facebook. We as developers could let you login to CNN through Google or Twitter, but allowing Facebook logins and using Facebook likes is a necessity. Or at least, a de facto standard.

Let’s say you wanted to make an alternative: You’d need to make sure that there’s an easy way for developers to incorporate it into their sites, because for a long time, you will be dealing with developers who have to put Facebook stuff on their website, and you’ll be their spare time project. If they can’t just drop it in, they won’t!

How will people react to Facebook in the long run?

As a Facebook user, the question that really matters is not privacy or the social graph. Instead: What’s in it for me? What do I get if I share all this information?

There isn’t that much value in sharing my movie preferences to a bunch of people, only some of whom are actually my friends. Twitter has proven that a market exists for conspicuous sharing – wide, out there, open sharing – but a lot of Facebook’s privacy woes come from incidental sharing – the “oops, I didn’t know that was public” type of sharing. One person came up with his own solution – all of his Facebook information is now public.

To borrow from the earlier 2000s: Some of us signed onto FB thinking it was LiveJournal, and it’s turned into MySpace. Those of us who thought that will move on.

Facebook’s main utility, for me and the one person I asked, is to see if my friends have updated their pages, and to upload and look at pictures. None of this has anything to do with the social graph, and until someone comes up with a killer app involving me sharing my links to fourteen different things, it’s not going to matter to me. I’ll just turn it off, and my Facebook page will be just another one of the many abandoned webpages I’ve made about myself.