Facebook pushes search further ahead - has "Like" replaced the "Link"???

I don't know how many of you stayed up and watched the Facebook F8 developer conference at 2am recently but I did. I wrote about it in this blog and it for me marked the start of a whole new web called the "Social Semantic Web".  While the company was vague about a lot of details the company has confirmed  that “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them”.  This is huge and could mark the start of some new forms of machine learning. Google are rumoured to be bringing out their own new search engine "Google Me" and what it means has been doing the rounds on the Internet of late. This is going to be healthy competition as ever for the user.

To all the SEO heads out there this now poses the question what is Facebook SEO and what is possible via the Open Graph.  What is clear now though is this marks the start of the beginning of Facebook's internet strategy.

At the technical level interesting questions that pop to mind are given that all of the OGP metadata is basically RDFa - theycould index the same info if it supported the OGP schema/namespace. The good news is FB is open to changing the OGP spec to better support the standardised version of RDFa http://groups.google.com/group/open-graph-protocol/browse_thread/thread/cc03368ef0d12c1a

As one commentator I read in a forum highlighted " What we really need is for Google Snippets to better support RDFa and also a standardised version. As does Yahoo (Search Monkey) Twitter (Annotations/Search) and eventually Bing. That way every website can add in a standard set of RDFa metadata to create semantic search engines which also creates better SEO for every website. My big fear right now is that each company will split RDFa efforts (now part of HTML5) and create their own namespaces."

It's got very interesting all of a sudden. What a day! I wonder what else is to come... it's hard to keep up with it all!!! :)