I watched a very interesting presentation from Charles Dowd (Head of Platform development in Facebook) at Blog Talk a recent conference in Galway.  If you look at the presentation you’ll see how powerful Facebook currently is and how this will continue to grow in importance.  Facebook is no longer just going to be www.facebook.com, Facebook is spreading throughout the web and will follow you wherever you go.

One change that hasn’t been released yet that Charles talked about was a Facebook bar which will start appearing at the bottom of pages you browse.  On this bar you will be able to ‘Like’ content, see who else has liked the content, perform searches and much more.  So Facebook will be with you at all times.

Facebook search is also going to be extremely powerful.  With a Google search we have machines that index content and we have search engine optimisation guys that know how this works and can influence this indexing.  But with Facebook the search results are weighted towards what content people like and the personalisation of this is what friends said they liked this content.  This is a manually indexed search completed be real people that has real power.   If you are interested to know where Facebook is going have a look at this video and watch it a couple of times if it doesn’t sink in.  It’s powerful stuff.

Charles Dowd (Facebook) – The Facebook Platform from DERI, NUI Galway on Vimeo.

Well done to Charles on his new role. I worked with Charles many years ago in a software company and we had some fun times.

Where do you think Facebook is heading?