According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook will introduce its Open Graph API next month at a major developer conference in San Francisco.
The API will help independent Web sites adopt elements of Facebook’s Fan pages. For instance, a visitor to one’s site could with one click become a “Fan”.
By getting sites to adopt the technology, Facebook hopes to make it even easier for users to share information from the Web on Facebook and to have that information associated with their Facebook identity.
Silicon Alley Insider helps make sense of this development by giving it some background.
In the year since Facebook Connect launched, more and more major brands have begun driving traffic not to their own domains, but to their branded Facebook Pages. These pages are attractive brands because once Facebook users become fans of a page, that page is free to update that friend regularly. It has been the return of email marketing. The Open Graph API, which will take Facebook fan pages out of Facebook without sacrificing these marketing tools is the next logical step.
The Insider also suggests Facebook has designs on building an ad network and on providing one-click e-commerce solutions. Bottom line, Facebook wants to own the largest possible slice of your daily Web experience.