Ever since Facebook announced the ability to add a Like button to any webpage I’ve been mulling over the consequences. My thoughts solidified. And I have decided that Facebook is f-ing brilliant.

To understand why I believe that, start by looking at search. Search today (hereafter ‘Google’) is based on crawling the web and ranking pages based on a number of criteria: Page title, page content, inbound links, etc. These criteria may as well be arbitrary: There’s no guarantee that the top result is what I want, it’s just the result that plays the Google-game the best.

Facebook is going to change that game. When Facebook has a big enough list of what websites my friends like, they can shape search results accordingly. I’ll go to Facebook and search the web, not only Facebook. The results are simply ordered by number of likes. The results with likes from my friends will be first, but then they can show results of things that my friend’s friends liked, out to two or three connections away from me. The social graph will re-shape the way I think about relevance.

Often I’m in an unfamiliar part of Boston, or out of town on a day trip, and I want to find someplace to eat. I can pull up Google and see what’s nearby, I can pull up Yelp and see ratings, I can pull up Urbanspoon and have it choose for me, but none of these are what  I want. I want to know where someone I know has eaten and if they liked it. I really don’t care if a stranger rated this restaurant five stars, we probably have different tastes. But I know my friends and I know which among them I trust for a food recommendation.

Facebook can own this, too. Facebook has a unique opportunity to steal Foursquare’s thunder by making location a big part of the platform. Instead of opening Yelp or Urbanspoon I’ll just open Facebook and see what’s on the map that my friends like. It’s not limited to restaurants: If my friends are checking into a golf course or a nightclub I’ll see that too. It will change the way I make decisions.

This is Facebook’s game to lose. They’ve got hundreds of millions of users around the world. They’ve got a hundred million dollars of infrastructure. Facebook has already started taking the first steps with the Like button, and it’s f-ing brilliant. I’m excited to see what’s next.