With 50,000 sites already adding Facebook’s like button and growing, Google has every reason to call some emergency meetings. Facebook’s Universal Like Button and Social Graph have only been around for about a week now and it is already starting to slap standard search in the face. Facebook’s calling this like button the “Social Link” in that it is allowing Facebook to index the web for its users in mind. In essence, results in social searches will be customized based on what your friends like too.
Where Google once crawled and indexed the web for us, Facebook is getting it’s 400,000,000 active users to do their dirty work. Needless to say, privacy issues are on the line but that never stopped Facebook before.
So given this news and the fact that this “social link” they’re calling “like” is already gaining some massive traction with people, what do we need to be thinking about for the future of search? It has only been one week and we are already rapidly moving in the direction of “liking” and if “liking” really does take off, what will happen to linking? Will linking become old news? What will become of SEO?
As Brian Solis once said, SMO (social media optimization) is the new SEO. The more this like button takes off, the less and less this link button becomes important on the web and in search. So will “liking” become the new “linking”?
What do you think?
While we’re on the topic, why don’ t you “Like” the Social Capitalist on Facebook!
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