Facebook held their annual F8 Developers Conference last month. The biggest announcement made was the introduction of the (now-delayed) “Timelines” feature, but the biggest news for Facebook developers was improvements made to the Open Graph for social sharing.
As part of the F8 push, Facebook is hosting Open Graph Road Show events in several cities starting with Chicago, which I attended last week. These events are geared to Facebook developers looking to implement the new Open Graph into their applications and talks are given by the engineers that work on the platform itself.
The event was held at the Sofitel Hotel in Chicago, a luxury hotel which was a great venue. Elegant, clean, and most importantly had great food for lunch. What surprised me was the number of empty seats. My unofficial headcount had less than 75 people in attendance.
Nick Grudin of the Platform Partnership Team started things off talking about how they are opening up the social graph to outside applications, allowing Facebook developers more options of how their users’ actions are shared on Facebook.
He made a good point about the evolution of web information, separating it into three “chapters”.
Chapter One: Portals
Site like Yahoo and MSN gathered large amounts of information and presented it in an organized fashion for their users. You could select topics you wanted to see and these portals would gather the info and display it for you. The biggest drawback was results could be limited only to content providers the portals were partnered with.
Chapter Two: Search
Google changed the game with their search algorithms. People could now find the information they were looking for much easier than the other search engines of the day. Google spawned Bing, and even Yahoo refocused its efforts on paid search.
Chapter Three: Social
People don’t have to search for new content, it is shared by their friends and people in their social networks. Obviously Google search isn’t going away anytime soon, but more and more people discover content by seeing what other people are looking at.
This creates a “people centric web” putting YOU at the center. Your common interests with your social networks makes it easier to find relevant content that you are interested in.
Social sharing and connecting powers applications as well. A great example was Photos. While existing photo sharing apps battled over feature lists such as red-eye correction, cropping, color correction and the like, Photos launched with one singular stand-out feature: Tagging the people in your pictures. This helped Facebook photos quickly become the largest photo sharing site.
The first games didn’t compete with existing games on graphics, or storylines, but simply let you challenge, and hopefully beat your friends, then gave you a way to publicly humiliate them for losing!
Facebook’s new Open Graph provides several ways to share information:
The Ticker
The (somewhat annoying) feed in the upper right that shares “low-level” events from your network in real-time.
Newsfeed
Facebook uses an algorithm to determine if the item is newsworthy or considers it “engaging” so not every one of your friends’ activities will be seen on your wall unless you have subscribed to “All Updates” from the user.
The New Timeline:
Currently only available to Facebook developers, users can select the events they want on their timeline to share their online identity. It is the curated content of the users own life.
Open Graph applications can use the Facebook API to publish information each of these ways as well. These apps now become “Lifestyle applications”. Rather than simply saying a user liked your fancy new birdwatching application, they can share that “Mike Spotted a Swainson’s Thrush”.
Facebook Developers can define the action/object combinations for each individual app, and how the details and groupings are displayed for the user. There is a manual approval process required before the apps can go live, that shouldn’t take longer than a week. I’m assuming this is so they can keep out sexual or offensive and inappropriate actions from appearing in the timeline.
The rest of the event was deep-dives into different areas of integration, such as Open Graph for Games, Marketing APIs, and mobile facebook apps.
The new Open Graph is a huge step forward from the “Like” button. I think we’ll quickly begin to see Facebook integrated in lots of cool new ways with the apps we use everyday. Facebook has already partnered with companies like Hulu and Spotify to integrate into the Open Graph.
I plan to follow this post up with a more technical look and example of sharing customized Open Graph events.
