Facebook Sweep: the killer app of Web 2.0?

I gave a talk last Friday at a Microsoft Research workshop on online social networks, in Cambridge, UK (pictured) about Facebook.

In it I described the Facebook social utility as made up of three key technologies. By understanding these three you can succeed in the online Web 2 world.

The key three are:

1. Facebook Social Network – Facebook’s social network we’re all signed up to because it’s easy to use, clean and has features that are light but powerful. Popular for adding friends, sharing photos, organising events and chat. This is the Facebook most people think about and use daily.
2. Facebook Platform – the ground breaking developer technology that allows me to write games that Facebook users can instantly play with their nearest and dearest. Games have led the way but more useful applications are on their way.
3. Facebook Sweep– the 48 hour news “sweep” checks all your friends mini-feeds for interesting stories and publishes the few that it thinks you’ll be most interested in to your newsfeed home page.

Of them all I recommend a renewed focus on the sweep. I see the Sweep as a technology to rival Google’s PageRank – it socialises my news (shows me stuff relevant to me and my friends), it throttles the news (shows me only the most interesting news) and it learns my interests (I give it explicit and implicit feedback).

The organisations that understand and conquer Facebook Sweep will indeed be the winners on the web’s most popular new media channel. This is because my personal newsfeed is the most important page I go to when I want a head’s up on all that’s new and important in my world. If you and your brand are not here, then you aren’t anywhere…

Tags: cambridge, facebook sweep, microsoft research, pagerank