Facebook pushes to make the Web more ‘instantly social’

Declaring that the Internet is at a turning point, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday announced initiatives that he predicted will make the Web “instantly social” — much like Facebook itself.

Zuckerberg, clad in a black sweatshirt and bluejeans, offered a vision of a simpler Web in which individuals will instantly know how their friends on Facebook feel about, say, restaurants reviewed on Yelp and elsewhere, music recommended on Pandora and other sites, and articles featured on CNN or other media.

“This is the most transformative thing we’ve ever done on the Web,” Zuckerberg told a throng of developers and journalists gathered in San Francisco for Facebook’s third “f8” conference in four years.

If the initiatives succeed, Facebook would increasingly move to the center of the Web industry. With more than 400 million users worldwide — and still growing rapidly, Zuckerberg said — Facebook has emerged as a challenger to Google.

“Facebook wants to be the starting point for your world — the new e-mail inbox,” Jeremiah Owyang, an Internet analyst with the Altimeter Group, wrote on his blog. “If they turn on advanced search tools, this can threaten google.com. “… All this social aggregated content will yield a powerful database of what you and your friends like, the precursor to customized Web experiences and social advertising.”

Facebook users who logged on to the site Wednesday were introduced to the changes with a boxed message: “Connect with your friends on your favorite websites.” The message provided a link for “instant personalization” and another inviting users to “understand your privacy.”

Facebook plans for a multitude of websites to feature a new Facebook-powered “social bar” across the bottom of the user interface that informs them of their friends’ opinions expressed on those sites.

Executives at Facebook, a company often criticized by privacy advocates, emphasized that the initiatives will have no effect on users’ privacy controls or share information a user does not want to share.

Over time, the initiatives will make the Web more useful, Zuckerberg said, because they will deepen semantic understanding for the medium as a whole. He said the changes also will benefit companies such as Google, increasingly viewed as Facebook’s chief rival.

Simplifying social interaction could bring a new sense of personality to many websites. Facebook’s plan “is really profound for us,” said Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, an Internet music streaming site that has more than 50 million users, many of whom also use Facebook.

“Pandora is not all that human,” Westergren explained. “There is no DJ, there is no voice in Pandora. This is going to put a face on it.”

The changes can also be used in business interaction. Microsoft, which owns a stake in Facebook, is launching a new document-sharing service called docs.com that provides Facebook notifications whenever documents are shared on the service, said Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft’s Future Social Experience Lab.

Facebook, founded six years ago in a Harvard University dorm room, from the start stood apart from rivals such as Friendster and MySpace by encouraging a culture in which the social network is an extension of the user’s identity.

The new steps represent an evolutionary change from the FB Connect service introduced in 2008, which enabled thousands of websites to integrate Facebook social aspects.

The FB Connect brand, Zuckerberg said, is being phased out because the new initiatives will create a more “seamless” Web experience.

The crowd cheered when Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was abolishing a policy that had imposed on developers a 24-hour limit for storing Facebook user data.

Facebook executive Bret Taylor later explained that the change will spare companies such as games maker Zynga, which has 100 million users, from downloading user data every day. The privacy agreements between other sites and their users remain unchanged, he said.

The name “f8,” Facebook executives say, derives from the eight-hour “hackathons” the company encouraged in its early days. The first f8 conference introduced the concept of the “social graph” of interpersonal connections. “Hacking the Graph” was the theme of Wednesday’s event.

Venture capitalist Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, an early investor in Facebook and a director of the company, said in an interview before Zuckerberg’s presentation that Facebook’s progress conforms to Zuckerberg’s initial vision of the company as a “social utility.”

In closing his comments, Zuckerberg expressed a lofty vision for the power of the Web.

“The world can be a lot better and we can make it that way,” he said. “I think that’s what binds this community together.”

Mercury News Staff Writer Mike Swift contributed to this report. Contact Scott Duke Harris at 408-920-2704.