A Big day for Facebook lovers and haters. Your profile and your social life going to change soon. At the company’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco, Zuckerberg laid out Facebook’s vision for the future of profiles. He described the history of the Facebook profile, starting with the original profile from 2006, when Facebook was still known as TheFacebook. He explained that through all of these iterations, Facebook profiles have been a good gauge of what you’re doing now, but they are not a good way to share what you or your friends have done in the past.
According to Zuck in his introduction to the keynote:
- A record 500 million people used Facebook the same day. We’re connected now. The next era will be defined by the social apps that use these connections.
- PROFILE: The profile is the heart of the FB experience, and people invest a lot in their profile. The old 2004 profile: how you introduce yourself to people, the first 5 minutes of your conversation
- People wanted more ways to express themselves, so we added the STREAM: that’s the next 15 minutes of a conversation- what you’ve been doing recently – that came in the 2008 new profile.
- But there’s more to us, to our deepest conversations. You want to express the story of your life in terms of the most important and meaningful parts of your life – this is the heart of your FB experience
The biggest new element today is Timeline, which Facebook has been working on for a year, although the apps changes and implications of the new GraphRank are huge as well.
Timeline is the story of your life, in a single page
- Timeline is about stories
- A new class of apps will work with Timeline, Ticker and the News Feed
- This is about a new way to express yourself, and as you can see, it’s much richer visually
And as Chris Cox, VP of Products, said, infographics have become very important- visualizing huge amounts of data. Timeline is about doing that for a person. What would a year in review look like for a person? Scrapbooks have been around for centuries, and this is a similar activity.
You can navigate via the the Facebook Timeline with the Time Slider
- Blue dots: more important things
- Gray dots: less important things
To add stuff to your timeline:
- Click on timeline, composer, then post
- Content for timeline can come from apps
You can add a major event to your timeline. We’ll get more detail about this when it’s widely released.
Apps can help you summarize activity into Reports
Mobile apps work with the timeline and can give you monthly or annual reports.
Express Yourself
Zuck says your Facebook profile should be “A place that feels like your home.” You highlight and curate your stories to express who you really are. Your cover photo is the big wide photo at the top- it should be a unique moment in your life.
You still have your profile pic.
To add a cover photo, you first click on the star (which also tells FB this is important) and you get a big photo to use as cover.
Timeline lets you control
- What you show
- How you display it, and
- Who can see it
The way timelines look can be very unique- a traveler vs musician vs. runner. Here is a musician’s timeline:
Open Graph, Apps, and Connections
Facebook has created a new class of apps to deal with the next version of open graph. Facebook’s mission is to make world more open and connected. They want you to have a more personal experience.
As of 2007, you could connect by liking. Now they want you to connect any way you want. What if you read a book but you don’t want to like it? What if you watch but don’t want to like a movie? You might not feel that strongly about it, and you might not want it to go into the News Feed to anoy your friends.
Now you’ll be able to eat a meal, hike a trail, and so on. This means Facebook is adding verbs to the connections- verbs in the social graph. They believe this will create many, many more connections in the graph. It also helps you express yourself in new ways- you don’t want to annoy friends with boring stuff.
Ticker is lightweight stream for less important stuff- socially acceptable way to express lightweight activity
- activity into ticker and timeline but not newsfeed
- share goes into newsfeed
You can define an action and publish in this new class of social apps. There are a lot of naturally social actions – communication and games – and there are already social apps for these. But there are not-so-social activities… private things- medical, finance- and there are few or no apps for these.
Build New Apps And Rethink Industries: Music, Movies and News
- Frictionless: You can now add activity to the timeline without seeing a share box pop-up. You can still publish but can add lightweight activity without the share box. Permissions: adding app to add activity, click add to timeline.
- Realtime serendipity- This is about the Ticker. Friends are already doing lots of things, we just aren’t aware of them, we’ll find out about them in our ticker, oh friend is listening to song, I’ll listen too at the same time. real time stalking
- Patterns: This is about the News Feed. Sometimes people do stuff that’s more rare or interesting, playlist created, or lots of friends listen to same artist- goes into news feed.
Music: Now you can chat and listen with your friends, regardless of the music player. You can find new commonalities with a friend.
The key to making the music biz work is trying to help you discover songs to buy more content than you would have otherwise. Discover music through your friends.
Zuck had the CEO’s of Spotify and Netflix come up and talk about how social will accelerate what they do. As Netflix CEO said, he might watch a movie he’d been putting off if a guy he was meeting later that day was watching it now. That’s a great commonality and conversation starter.
This works for reading news, too. You can see what friends are reading Washington post social reader:
Taking Games to the Next Level
Games have been most successful app thus far. Now, no share box- activities go straight to ticker. And more information will be visible to friends. Mike plays a specific word in Words With Friends while playing Carl, and I can that word and even a picture of the board.
Integrating This Into Your Apps, and OMG GraphRank!
Very easy: decide what action in your app fits into the social graph, and add an add to timeline button in your app. They’re launching six templates and a flexible query engine. You can add geolocation to the activities. It works everywhere- web, mobile, iPad, everywhere.
App discovery- if people like it, they should see it. You shouldn’t need tricks or gimmicks for people to find them.
GraphRank may be the new EdgeRank. What do I want to see in News Feed vs. someone’s timeline? Different types of relationships work differently- work friends vs. family, etc. – this is probably going to integrate the new friends lists and family categorizations.
App developers will see what activities people do the most and what annoys people.
Courtesy : Allfacebook
Check out our new post on How to Enable the New Facebook Timeline NOW
