Mark Zuckerberg Is About to Tap Consumer Insights a Search Engine Can Only Dream of

Remember the computer network in “The Terminator” that progressively got so smart it became sentient and attempted to annihilate the human race? That network was called Skynet, and its goal was to remove the possibility of human error and slowness of reaction time to guarantee fast, efficient response to enemy attack.

Wednesday, at F8, the annual Facebook Developer Conference, Facebook announced its open graph initiative to take the social network to its next logical evolution — everyplace other than Facebook. The initiative is designed to use people’s social interactions (when logged into Facebook, which is like always, natch) to shape their experiences across every possible connected environment. On the Facebook blog, founder Mark Zuckerberg stated that “the power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken.”

Imagine visiting Pandora and it already knows how to program your station. Or visiting CNN and having it know what kind of news to display for you. As a consumer, there are potentially many benefits of the initiative, making many experiences you have more and more relevant the more interactions you perform.

In order to make all of this happen, a significant amount of non-personally identifiable data will be collected from consumers and made available to approved developers and publishers (75 at launch). As you might imagine, there will probably be some backlash from people concerned about privacy (heck, people made a fuss over the Census). But the promise here is that your experience on the web will be better thanks to Facebook and its delivery of more customized, relevant content.