In case you didn’t already know by now, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his Director of Products, Brett Taylor (former Co-Founder and CEO of Friendfeed) introduced the next iteration of the Facebook Platform called the Open Graph to the web developer community, and it was generally well received by the public at large—at least on the content provider side.

Despite this announcement coming a mere two weeks ago on April 21, 2010 at the company’s third annual f8 conference, the Facebook Like Button was already implemented on over 50,000 websites and was seen tens of billions of times globally. In fact, the Like Button instantly exceeded 1 billion impressions in less than 24 hours with only 75 major websites using it at launch.

But what exactly does this mean for the sports marketing world, and what about you Joe fan?

Yesterday’s 2010 NFL Draft was one of the most anticipated and hotly debated in recent history, both off- and online. Rightfully so, the NFL has made a concerted effort to facilitate and capture fan conversations that are taking place across social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and blogging networks.

The key to the NFL’s online social media draft strategy was recognizing that “conversations are happening in a lot of different places,” NFL.com’s General Manager Laura Goldberg said. “We want to make sure we’re aggregating comments no matter where they are.”

A few weeks ago, I contributed to an e-book put together by fellow sports and social media enthusiast Jason Peck. The focus of my post was industry predictions for 2010 and given the nature of our work at Activ8Social, I decide to focus on individual athletes. I came up with three primary growth areas to keep an eye on: Promotions, Live Video, and Mobile.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a few examples and decided to point them out to better demonstrate my predictions. Here’s my original post, coupled with a recent example of each primary growth area. Drop me a line and let me know how you see sports and social media growing in 2010 (hopefully by leaps and bounds).