The day my Wall Street Journal home page offered me the chance to sign in via Facebook (News - Alert), I was mortified. I complained bitterly to my security friends, who shrugged me off. While I hear from the advocates in Washington about concern of abuse by various carriers, Facebook, the true deep packet inspector, is offering to connect me to the outside world. In other words, Facebook has become an augmented reality.

For many people, Facebook is the way they want the Web delivered, as was pointed out in a conversation with Bill Volk of Playscreen. And as HTML5 gets deployed, the experience is going to grow. The reason is the ability to offer mass customization from the experience. Right now we go to Facebook and we all see our wall of friends and our interests. In the future, the context will be refined and our location will be apparent. 

In the M2M space, this shows up in the use of digital signage. The use of “Bump” will not be necessary. It will be possible for the signage to be made aware of your browsing and sync with your browsing locally. The smartphone and digital signage will complement each other with messaging.

One company touching this reality now is Insteo, which can use a company’s Facebook page to update the digital signage. 

That’s nice, but we will end up going a lot further. I sat in my HTML5 class last night and built a page that was tracking my whereabouts, as were the rest of the class. I put the information on the display but I could have used the information to suggest something in common to talk about with the classmate next to me. It pointed out something they had just bought and suggested I consider the same purchase. 

If I were in a store, the digital sign and my browser could have tag (News - Alert)-teamed me with the deals on the signs and recommendations from friends (like Amazon’s recommendations).

I find this stuff pretty creepy, but the reality is I am the minority. My wife and her friends post all sorts of stuff. I find it invasive, but it is obviously persuasive.

Facebook has a more direct relationship with the customer, and retailers are looking for ways to catch our attention. So expect to see the Facebook login ability to start appearing on your retail websites. And when you login that way and visit the retailer, don’t be surprised when the signs all seem to be made just for you. 

They probably are.

Carl Ford (News - Alert) is a partner at Crossfire Media.

Edited by Tammy Wolf