At the Facebook f8 conference earlier this year, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Open Graph as “the most transformative thing we’ve ever done for the web” and with that announcement, the disparate strands of the world wide web became more tightly woven.

At the time, and to my surprise, mention of Facebook Credits was minimal at best—but as more information becomes available, it’s my prediction that Facebook Credits will be the NEXT major step Facebook takes toward unifying the online experience from simple, social interactions to true social commerce (or when tied to Facebook commerce, labeled as fCommerce).

Before we dive into where I see that going, here’s a quick recap of what Facebook Open Graph is and how it lays the foundation for Facebook Credits to revolutionize the online experience for users and marketers alike.

An Open Graph Recap

The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. A website owner can add a few lines of code to connect his or her site to Facebook, so what a user does off Facebook provides Facebook behavioral data about that user. At its simplest form is the Facebook Like button that has made its way onto websites of all types and sizes.

For example, if a Facebook user visits IMDB.com (one of the more than 1 million partner websites utilizing the Open Graph protocol) and Likes the Mad Men TV show, this interaction would immediately update the user’s Facebook profile with additional psychographic data on his likes and interests.

When the same user is logged into Facebook, that updated psychographic profile data becomes very beneficial for marketers. During the fourth season of Mad Men, Unilever created a series of six retro commercials to be aired during the show. Unilever can now leverage that Like on IMDB to create a very targeted ad campaign on Facebook. This is why Facebook Ads can be highly effective as they target both demographic and psychographic data.

But the use of Open Graph gets even more interesting.

When that user visits another Open Graph partner site such as Amazon.com, Amazon knows the user likes Mad Men based on what he did on IMDB and can now showcase books, music and other products such as the Mad Men soundtrack. With over 1,000,000 sites currently incorporating Open Graph, Facebook becomes the hub of an amazing amount of data and provides websites the ability to truly personalize the social commerce experience to each individual visitor if the site integrates with Facebook. Read More