[Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Inside Facebook Gold, our new data and analysis membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth. Inside Facebook Gold presents weekly in-depth analysis articles exploring the most critical developments impacting the future of the Facebook ecosystem. Click here to learn more.]

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg formally announced the Open Graph Protocol and the Open Graph API, a complementary set of technologies designed to make it easier for the web to be structured in a social way. The Open Graph vision is certainly an ambitious one, and the history of structured web initiatives is littered with the corpses of over-idealistic endeavors.

What makes Facebook’s attempt to organize the web in a new way different? And if it works, what will it mean for the way information is discovered online? Specifically, what will it mean for information that monetizes very well and thus forms the basis of the search marketing (SEM) and search optimization (SEO) industries?

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