Roundup: A Lot of News From Facebook F8 Conference
UPDATE: And if the news below isn't enough, the Facebook Blog has gone live with a new design.
Today, Facebook held their F8 Developer Conference. What follows are a few highlights from comments made by executives at the event. We've also linked to two Facebook Blog posts from Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO and Austin Haugen. Remember, these are just highlights but clicking the title link will take you to the full text.
In an announcement today at Facebook's F8 Developer Conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook Connect, that tool that allows you to connect your other social media applications to Facebook and share information between them, is on its way out. In its place comes Open Graph, which basically takes the concept behind linking your Facebook account with your other social media and puts it on steroids. One of the ways Open Graph will work is through Facebook Like buttons that can be attached to digital content.
Example here.
Note: the Facebook "Like" logo on the right side of the page.
Note: According to the WSJ, the Like buttons are set to go live later on Wednesday.
There is data outside of Facebook that the company wants to be brought in and made relevant inside of the Facebook platform.
2) Social Plugins
Not to be outdone by Twitter and their @Anywhere platform, Facebook will be rolling out new plugins to spread the Facebook love all across the internet. The Open Graph is all about bringing information into Facebook, these plugins do the opposite.
In the words of Bret Taylor, of FriendFeed fame, “Social plugins are a way you can provide an instantly personal experience with one line of HTML.” Does that sound familiar?
3) Search
Continuing with the developer theme, Facebook is opening to doors on the data vault and letting people look in at everything not marked private.
Developers will be able to search all data that is public, and with the new rules on storage, they will be able to keep it for more than a day. This is going to make Facebook applications both deeper, and wider. To refrain, Facebook wants happy developers.
4) OAuth 2.0
Facebook will adopt the OAuth 2.0 authentication standard, in partnership with Yahoo and Twitter.
Facebook Offers New Features Connecting to Broader Web (via WSJ)
Re: The "Like Buttons"
1) Facebook said dozens of partners have signed up to use the technology, including ticketing site Fandango.com and news site CNN.com. It said it would allow a group of pre-vetted Web sites, such as Docs—a new online service from Microsoft Corp.—as well as Yelp and Pandora, to offer customization without requiring their users to log in or click connect.
2) In a keynote address, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg depicted the new technology as an expansion of Facebook's vision and a new way to organize the information on the Web. For years, he said, the company has focused on tying together people on the Web, mapping out who knows whom.
Now, Facebook wants to map out connections between people, places and things, gathering more explicit information about users' specific interests in order to deliver them a more personalized experience on Facebook and on other sites.
He called it "most transformative thing we have ever done for the Web."
This flow of social information has profound benefits—from driving better decisions to keeping in touch more easily—and we're really proud that Facebook is part of the shift toward more social and personalized experiences everywhere online.
Three years ago at our first f8 conference for developers, I introduced the concept of the social graph, which is the idea that if you mapped out all the connections between people and the things they care about, it would form a graph that connects everyone together. Facebook has focused mostly on mapping out the part of the graph around people and their relationships.
[Snip]
This next version of Facebook Platform puts people at the center of the web. It lets you shape your experiences online and make them more social. For example, if you like a band on Pandora, that information can become part of the graph so that later if you visit a concert site, the site can tell you when the band you like is coming to your area. The power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken.
The Activity Feed surfaces the actions your friends are taking on a website. CNN.com is known for bringing you breaking news coverage, but imagine experiencing this news in a more personalized way, and seeing a stream of friends' activity.
3. Recommendations
Recommendations help make sites more relevant to you by highlighting content based on the top "Likes" across a site. Think of it as a people-powered "most popular" list.
Source: Examiner; The Next Web; WSJ; Facebook Blog
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