Like: Facebook’s ambition to sweep the web

The new "like" feature that jumps off Facebook and onto other sites on the web should pull even more organizations and small businesses and off the web and into Facebook.

Although this week's announcement focuses on companies like Pandora getting the shared like button, I think the move will increase the need for the smaller businesses and organizations making sure they are a part of the Facebook network.

Creating a page/mini-site within Facebook will be the easiest way. Still, for many organizations even this will be a challenge as the requirements for Facebook success goes beyond words and visuals. Regular updates and frequent interactions are keys to success.

A Facebook site is not something to just hand off to a third-party for design and implementation. It takes integration within the organization. It means making interaction part of the company's daily infrastructure. It means making openess more then "my door is always open" from the top executives.

Lots of talk on the web, but technical evangelist Robert Scoble pulls together a good summary of the news, what it means, links, and video in a s post on Facebook’s ambition. The man who Facebook dropped for 24 hours once explores the scariness of the new effort and shares a conversation with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg:

"Today I told Zuckerberg that he now has the modern-day railroad in his grasp and challenged him to both win our trust and not abuse the major power he’s going to aggregate."

Scoble suggests that the Facebook moves completed "a major piece of commerce infrastructure that would affect our lives for decades" and compared it to the completion of the railroad tracks across the United States.

"It opened the west. Made new careers possible. Let fresh food from California get to Chicago before it spoiled and all that. But it created an organization that had a LOT of power that wasn’t always used well."

It's up to businesses, organizations and people, whether they are friends, members, fans or likers, to become the check on Facebook. You won't get that by staying away or by jumping in only to answer random quizzes and play games.

Updated April 26, 2010 to fix typo in Scoble quote so that it now reads new careers, not few careers.