Facebook's news yesterday at the F8 conference can be boiled down to one statement: the company wants to be the identity system for the web, but not just for people, but for every type of object that can be boiled down into a URL: restaurants, places, chunks of media— eventually just about anything physical or abstract that we can think of wiring into the net.

On the one hand this is great news for the semantic web geeks because we'll finally get the right combination of ease-of-use and incentives required for publishers to truly mark up their content appropriately for the coming semantic search engine that Facebook will be deploying (though they were too smart to use this stinker of a label yesterday). Publishers want to traffic and engagement they will likely get, users want the convenience of overlaying their friends on top of the web, developers want the power of playing with all of this newly exposed data, and Facebook just plain wants the data as their endrun on Google. Everybody wins. Right?

Except of course that, at scale, this is giving an inordinate amount of power to one company. The kind of power that would make IBM handing the keys to the PC over to Microsoft look like the Portuguese Air Force by comparison (all two planes).

Here is an interesting thought experiment: imagine if Microsoft had used their combination of Frontpage HTML authoring tool and Internet Explorer monopoly to inject metatags in every document created, and corresponding code in the browser to read the tags and collect the data in a master database in the sky for subsequent mining— all in the name of enhancing the user experience. People would then have the convenience of the semantic web at the expense of giving all of that power to Microsoft. Instinctively, wouldn't you recoil at this proposition?

And in fact people did— despite the fact that Microsoft's was a much less ambitious plan. The whole "Smart Tags" fiasco taught the company a lesson about the boundary between useful and creepy. And yet, now we are seeing the same movie again, albeit from a much more clueful and powerful competitor when it comes to the web.

What am I missing?