Does Facebook Really Want a Semantic Web?

From Alex Iskold in ReadWriteWeb:

Two weeks ago, Facebook has announced a major new initiative called Facebook Open Graph. This is an attempt to not only re-imagine Facebook, but in a lot of ways, an attempt to re-define how the Web works. We wrote in details about the implications of this move for all interested parties.

A big part of the announcement is Facebook’s vision of a consumer Semantic Web. In this new world, publishers have an incentive to annotate pages by marking up activities, events, people, movies, books, music and more. The proper markup, would in turn, lead to a much more interconnected Web – people would be connected with each other across websites and around the things they are interested in.

Directionally, this vision is both correct and important. We’ve been talking about pragmatic approach to the Semantic Web for sometime, and we’re excited at the possibility of it finally happening. Yet, two weeks after the announcement it is becoming more and more apparent that there are gaps in Facebook’s offering and intentions. A close look reveals that perhaps Facebook’s intent is not to make the Web more structured, but instead to engineer a way for more data – mostly unstructured – to flow into Facebook databases..

As you will see from the rest of the post, it appears that getting semantics right has not been a big priority for Facebook, at least not prior to the announcement.

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