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Mark Zuckerberg’s dramatic announcement at last week’s f8 signifies that Facebook has decided to take upon itself a responsibility for enabling and encouraging users to expand their dialog outside the scope of Facebook and on the web at large. It’s an ambitious project aiming to add a personal and social aspect to every website capable of adding Facebook’s buttons.

Facebook planned the launch carefully and at the outset of the feature its already available on many top online destinations, including: CNN, ESPN, IMDb, and others. Backed by the knowledge that Likes are supported by such a team of powerhouses Zuckerberg ventured a prediction that Facebook likes would cross the 1 Billion mark 24 hours from launch.

Its interesting to note that at the most basic level there’s little that is new about the new feature. After all people have been “Liking” each other’s Facebook posts, some of which include links to external websites, from the very start.  In fact there’s a whole industry of  services and plugins aimed at doing exactly what Facebook has now made generally accessible itself. One might well ask “What’s all the excitement about?”

The excitement is justified in this case for a number of reasons:

1. The scope of the move – Facebook’s announcement affects 400 million users on Facebook alone, this is before we count the countless millions of users on the partner sites mentioned above who aren’t Facebook users…
2. The scope of data Facebook will own – For me the most significant fact that the announcement highlights is that Facebook will greatly increase the already unrivaled data set it owns regarding each and every one of its users. Facebook will now know not only whatever these users shared about themselves explicitly and via their social data, but will also have the ability to couple this data to a users “likes”, or in other words couple the personal and social data to behavioral data reflecting a user  acknowledged preferred webpages.

Why is this a big deal?

Other than the fact that Facebook, a private company, will now know more about each and every one of it’s users than any company has ever known before (shudder), there are deeper implications for the web of this new functionality that we’ll probably begin to see faster than we can imagine. Facebook powered sites have, at least in theory, the ability to provide a tailored individual experience for every Facebook user visiting them. They might show the user which of is his/her friends reacted to the content, and how, or they might suggest “Smart sharing” – offering those friend most likely to be interested in this particular type of content. The full extent of the future functionality the move enables is difficult to predict but there can be little doubt that the web is about to undergo a pretty significant change.