"Anonymous login" has accelerated Facebook to become the world's largest data broker

One of the most important gains at the Facebook developers ' Conference on April 30 was the company's push for a new "anonymous login" (Anonymous logins) feature that Mark Zuckerberg was actually playing with the word, because technically the feature was not entirely "anonymous".

With this feature, the user's Facebook data will remain in Zuckerberg's huge database (more than 1 billion active mobile users), meaning that anonymous logons could actually help the world's largest social network become the world's most powerful data broker in the coming years, Facilitates advertisers and application developers.

The anonymous login feature will allow ordinary users like me to avoid sharing any personal information we have on Facebook with developers-or, more importantly, the lucrative ad networks associated with this application. As an extension of Facebook Connect, this feature prevents data from spreading anywhere outside the Facebook site, allowing the social network to retain the data for the new mobile ad application Platform "Audience network" (audience receptacle).

Mobile ad networks and a handful of developers will see this as an eyesore, because it encourages users to trust Facebook more and cuts off access to valuable data from third parties.

"Anonymous Login" and "Audience network" together form a new and important service that Facebook offers advertisers. The hype is similar to what traditional mobile advertising giants such as Flurry and inmobi have done with their drums, analyzing application users to better help advertisers pinpoint users. These sites do not necessarily require user names to be effectively positioned, they only need to collect the user's behavior within the application. For example, I can log on anonymously with the name of flurry, but the ad giant still has the ability to create flurry accounts for my iphone and edit and reclassify them every few weeks, which is still valuable to advertisers.

The success of Facebook is to build up a valuable database of such personal data and behavioral data and to make it available to advertisers. Ad sites such as flurry can still collect data through applications that write analytics tools into code, but the competitor that is suddenly killed not only has more personal data for the application user, but it may have authenticated information such as the user's name and social graph.

As my colleague Kashmir Hill points out, the anonymous login feature "will make it easier for people to use Facebook as their universal landing account and application ecosystem on the Web." Even if it means that people don't visit Facebook so often, "they continue to interact with other services using Facebook accounts."

Facebook subtly changed the whole idea of a platform. The traditional understanding of the platform is to use the platform as a way to get content and services, such as the mobile operating system of Apple and Google. The boundaries of these "ecosystems" have been clearly delineated, and consumers will carefully consider buying the next smartphone.

On the contrary, Facebook has created a more intimate platform beyond the user's line of sight, providing application developers with back-end tools such as analysis, recognition, and push notifications, as well as new features such as internal-application links-all of which are posted at the F8 conference.

These incentives, including the new app growth program called Fbstart, will eventually link the apps we use every day to the behind-the-scenes web giant Facebook that created the platform.

Facebook's applinks technology is particularly noticeable. This is the product of Facebook's acquisition of Parse a year ago, showing how users can jump from one application to another without shutting down and opening them. The experience of this technique is akin to switching between pages that are open on a browser, but users do not know that they remain in Facebook's small world. By getting rid of traditional ways of thinking and providing developers with back-end tools and anonymous logins for consumers, Facebook wants to encourage the sharing of more personal data that can be used to serve advertisers eager for more accurate positioning.

Of course, it is up to advertisers to determine whether the new network that Facebook is creating in the background will yield a good return on investment. Facebook still has to advertise its anonymous login capabilities to more developers and consumers.

But advertisers are excited by the promise of new prospects for Facebook, and some advertisers expect Facebook to be better than the services Google has so far offered.

"This expands the input of Facebook data. Mark Dimasmo, chief executive of Dimassimo Goldstein, an advertising agency, said he was "bullish" on the services Facebook is about to launch for advertisers. "Google knows what people are searching for, and Facebook knows who you are." ”

(Responsible editor: Meng)