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April 11, 2013

Facebook’s Open Graph: Making Droids Out of Humans



The original Article was written by me on Busines2Community

I’m sure this is something that has been spoken about many times before especially when Facebook’s Open Graph was launched and a lot of products enabled the embedding of open graph into their APIs, and specifically ensuring that a lot of verbification happens on the go. Every product that has been launched within the start-up ecosystem has ensured that their app or product has an element of verb and being hooked on to their users in terms of ensuring that every time they use the app, automatically the action is shared on Facebook.

Fast forward to last week. I was just generally going through my own timeline for Facebook. I’ve been very sporadic as far as my use on Facebook is concerned. Generally speaking, my overall consumption and sharing on Facebook has reduced over a period of time now. I’m sure there are plenty of reasons for that, and yes, day by day, Facebook is really becoming a repository of meaningless content mostly not so much worth curating even. 

Of course, the kind of information that is already managed via my lists and by blocking / hiding feeds from unnecessary feeds is already taken care of. Yet, there isn’t a lot of information that I share myself and a lot of times users are sharing what’s happening in their lives.

Which is where, something I noticed on my timeline made me go back and think about how this Facebook Open Graph has changed the ball game already with how people are sharing information on their timelines. Soon enough, this is probably something that will determine how people will go about interacting with their friends or rather interacting with friends through applications.

Take a look at some of my recent updates.









Facebook Updates of the Open Graph Culture:

  • I biked 10 kms via Runkeeper
  • I read Steve JObs on GoodRead
  • I checked in at McDonalds, Mumbai
  • I am watching The House of Cards on GetGlue
  • I pinned Paris to ‘Places I want to Travel to’
  • I viewed ‘How to Sell Better’ on Slideshare

It’s already happening and very few of us realize how that is affecting our content sharing and consumption behaviours, but soon enough the Social would actually move towards A-Social and very cyborg like connections that we are heading towards. In fact, moving forward, with the introduction of Google Glass, this would be something that would completely change the game.

Going by how human intelligence is striving towards making everything automated and we are all becoming bots or droids of various products sharing various updates through so many social apps, it’d be hard to find a manual update and most interaction on Social would be droid like and less social in its truest sense.

What do you think?

Srinivas has been a communications professional for over 15 years. He has worked with and built India's largest digital agencies from the ground up and been part of their acquistion journey. Social Wavelegnth (now Mirum, part of the WPP group) and Kinnect, now part of the Interpublic Group (IPG). He's also been a public speaker, keynote speaker at various large panels/events of the likes of BBC Knowledge Summit, Blockchain Summit Bangalore. And has been a guest lecturer at IIM, Symbiosis, Indian Institute of Digital Education.
He has been blogging since 2005. And also been author at various publications, that include Startup India by ZDNet, Social Samosa, Lighthouse Insights.  His passion for Writing, Advertising, Creativity, Digital, Blockchain and Future Tech is what drives him each day.

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