This was big week for Facebook.   The king of social networking companies held its 3rd F8 developers conference on Wednesday, at which several new improvements and features were announced.   Amongst these, Facebook announced plans to expand its “like” feature from within its own site to any other website across the Internet.  In doing so, it intends to harvest vast amounts of valuable user specific information that data miners and marketers can troll to create highly efficient directed advertising campaigns in addition to a more personalized web browsing experience for users.

By placing a Facebook “like” button on a website, site owners can have their site instantly listed on a Facebook user’s profile.   While friends of that user can view their “likes”, other websites could tap into this information (with the user’s permission) in order to present a personally tailored on-site experience.   For example, if a Facebook user “likes” sites associated with a particular band, music sites such as Pandora could automatically populate playlists for the user with songs by that band.  Sites could also aggregate the “likes” of people in a user’s social network to present targeted advertising and content based on the interests of the those with whom a users associates.  Overall, these features do offer a new level of convenience and personal specificity to the web.   But it’s hard not to question the long term result of constraining content to specific socially influenced circles.

The first problem is that Facebook intends to create a single unified interface by which its quickly growing cache of over 400 million users create and share social data – across all aspects of a person’s life.  While there is value in this, I tend to dislike the idea of fully integrating my various social circles – a long term trend towards which social networking seems to be moving.  I don’t want my personal life melded with my professional life, nor do I want to be bombarded with the personal interests of my professional colleagues.   Neither my Facebook friends nor I want to have personal hobbies influence professional web browsing – or vice versa.   I like using distinct services like Linkdin, Twitter, Foursquare, and even Facebook for social networking the various seperate aspects of my life – a model Facebook alone, with its massive growth, could challenge.

Secondly, I don’t necessarily like the idea of having my web viewing experience individually tailored to my personal interests before I even get there.   Again, while this could be portrayed as a convenient, more immersive user experience, it doesn’t exactly foster the same environment of discovery that the Internet has traditionally offered.   How will anyone try new things or consume alternate and dissenting opinions if the sites they visit are uniquely tailored to present only pleasing information based on previously selected “liked” topics?  Some of the best web content I’ve discovered has been contrary to my own personal views, outside the realm of my “comfort zone”, and otherwise completely unknown to me.  I hope the future of the Internet doesn’t preclude this type of unique discovery process.