Peter Steiner's famous cartoon in New Yorker magazine first appeared in 1993 and has adorned a million powerpoint slides since. The cartoon's single line, 'On the internet no one knows you're a dog', captured some of the crazy, frontier spirit of the web, where it seemed the normal rules did not apply. However, that could be about to change as Facebook rattles its way up to 300 million users worldwide, making it more populus than all but four of the globe's countries, powered by its new Connect facility and Open Stream API. In this instantly-seminal Wired essay, Fred Vogelstein makes the point: "Connect and Open Stream don't just allow users to access their Facebook
networks from anywhere online. They also help realize Facebook's
longtime vision of giving users a unique, Web-wide online profile. By
linking Web activity to Facebook accounts, they begin to replace the
largely anonymous "no one knows you're a dog" version of online
identity with one in which every action is tied to who users really are." Regardless of the way you may feel about Facebook, it's becoming increasingly easy to see how much better the web can be if you can search people - not just pages. The result will be a very different looking web, where information-overloaded people circle the wagons to create troll-free social networks of their most trusted contacts, picking up whispers, buying tips and news only from within those groups. For brands, the value of links from within those circles will be much higher than from any other source. "Why settle for articles about the Chrysler bankruptcy that the Google
News algorithm recommends when you can read what your friends suggest?", says Vogelstein, in a shift which FriendFeed users might recognise. In other words, who wants to know what a dog thinks? And the realisation of the value of this information is not lost on Google, as shown by the company's launch of Friend Connect and more recently individual profiles. No doubt all driven by the ever-growing blackhole in its search results created by Zuckerberg's empire which is vast but invisible to the Google index. But show me the money, right? Well Facebook has quietly been building annual revenues to the tune of $275m. Nowhere near the scale of the shekel machine that is Google. However, as the Wired article notes, Messrs Page & Brin bowled along for five years before stumbling over the Adsense pot of gold. And Facebook's recent credit system shows it is serious about innovation. All of which could mean a troll-free web experience, a shake-up of Search and some genuine competition for Google. And fewer dogs.








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