Facebook looks to become your one-stop web shop

Facebook has become closer to its dream of web user’s everything by allowing users to subscribe to magazines without having to leave their news feed.

It has long been suggested that Facebook will one day replace our need for Google, and this could be another step towards that dream of Zuckerberg’s. Not because people can buy magazines now through the site, but because Facebook is allowing users to do other web actions within the Facebook site, other than just ‘networking’, without ever having to actually leave.

Synapse, a division of Time that sells subscriptions for a number of publishers, is collaborating with Alvenda, a company that builds e-commerce applications, to introduce a system letting Facebook users buy print magazine subscriptions without leaving the site or even the Facebook news feed.

The system, which will be live in the US from July or August, will also allow Facebook users to expand those blurbs of magazine content that are now common in the news feed into full articles, complete with advertising – again without leaving the news feed, much less Facebook itself.

One of the benefits of such a scheme of course is the ability to capture a user’s information, instantly. This in turn will allow the magazine and its advertisers to deliver up targeted ads to that users and all of their friends.

When Facebook announced its ‘Open Graph’ at F8, it didn’t take long for commentators to tout the demise of Google. Facebook may be making strides to kill Google’s dominance of the web, but it has a long way to go to actually take-over its function. SEO, after all, is far from dead.

But, consumers don’t want to leave where they are on the web, wherever they are. And it is this fact that Facebook still needs to cash in on.

It’s clear why magazines would like to do actual business on Facebook – magazines are losing vast amounts of subscribers and Facebook has 450 million global users. But more than that, magazines have also been getting better at selling print subscriptions through the internet.

For example, Next Issue Media, a coalition of five print publishers, will sell print subscriptions along with editions tailored for tablet computers and e-readers.

As for its battle with Google, Facebook may be one of the most popular websites around, but it is still learning how to offer up the web. And Google does this for free and to non-registered users.