Watch f8 live with us!
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Keynote announcements:
Timeline “The story of your life”-
All stories, all apps, a new way to express who you are- it’s all here.
What timeline does is it starts summarizing all the important things you’ve done in your life. By summarizing it allows you to tell your whole story on a single page.
Even though timeline pulls content from your profile you can also also add content to your timeline yourself.
“People on Facebook love apps”
They want to use apps to express themselves. You can start sharing things from apps in boxes in the timeline. You can also make reports- seeing a summary of what you’ve done can be more interesting than reading every single line item. You can get reports every month or year.
How do you add an app to the timeline? From your friends timelines just hover and click, than accept permissions. This will add it to your timeline. How to build timeline apps will be later in the keynote..
Facebook wanted to make timeline a place where you can really express yourself. You get a big photo at the top of the timeline (a cover photo). You can change this photo as often as you’d like as well as many other features. Check out the introduction to timeline here.
New Apps-
2 008- Social graph was introduced
Last year- Open graph was introduced
This year they’re taking the next step. Now you’ll be able to connect to anything you want in any way that you want.
Now you wont have to like a book or a movie, you can just read and watch.
Last year they added nouns, this year they’re adding verbs.
Ticker is a lightweight stream of everything that’s going on around you. When you share a post it goes into newsfeed, when you add an item via opengraph it goes to the ticker.
Previously there was no way to share lightweight activity without bugging their network.
They think this will make it possible to make a completely new class of social apps.
Naturally social- communication and games
Not naturally social- personal information like finance
Everything to do with media- music, movies, tv, books are naturally social so they’ll make great additions to the open graph
Everything that you’re doing will be added to the timeline, so they’ve re-done the permissions dialog. They’ve added a clear snapshot of how apps will add information to the timeline without having to prompt via dialog boxes every time. This is a frictionless experience.
How will this help you discover content through your friends? Real-time serendipity.. You can see what you’re friends are doing in real-time in the ticker. You can play songs from spotify that you see in the ticker in-line. This will then be added to your ticker and help the viral spread of media.
If you want to find your friends music interests you can now go look at their timeline for a snapshot of their music experiences. You can then see patterns in their activity to discover really cool new things.
Knowing that you helped a friend discover something new is really awesome. You get a notification whenever you’ve helped a friend create a new media interest. Awesome.
They’ve worked with a LOT of partners that are primarily focused on discovery. Discovering music through your friends is a great experience.
CEO of Spotify talks about what they’re doing with the open graph-
“It’s a big day for everyone who loves music”
Finding new music is difficult. Napster changed the music industry and Spotify has created an even better service that compensates artists.
Adding music to Facebook makes a lot of sense. Spotify users who connect to Facebook listen to more music on a daily basis and listen to a bigger variety of music. They are also more engaged. They have discovered that this means that they are also purchasing twice as much music as they were before, which is great for the user and the artist.
Go Spotify!
This also works with:
TV (hulu)- they built a brand new canvas app.
Movies- Netflix player
Ad supported, subscription based and new models that haven’t even been thought of yet are now possible.
CEO of Netflix-
New Facebook interaction in the ticker has helped him discover Breaking Bad. : ) This was a serendipitous experience.
.. My internet cut out. Sorry guys!
It’s not just Netflix and Hulu. They have more than a dozen partners that have built new apps.
What about news? Now you will be able to see the most popular news stories across the web. You will also see this in your newsfeed as it relates to your network.
News companies such as the Daily are creating canvas apps.
Social games are killing it. They are the most successful type of app on Facebook. Now when you see your friends playing games across the site, you will now be able to see things in your ticker in real-time. If your friends are playing Words With Friends you will be able to see what word they are playing and navigate you to the game page.
Last category: Lifestyle apps. The apps that allow you to keep track of things in your life. You will now be able to get reports and be able to discover new lifestyle apps from your friends with just a new clicks (Nike Plus, Foodspotting, etc).
Are you excited about this new and improved version of the Open Graph?
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Now From Bret Taylor CTO:
They will be rolling out Timeline over the next few months.
For every person and every individual activity there’s an app that someone will make to highlight this activity.
Open graph apps are about more than just sharing- self expression and serendipity.
You can now discover more from your friends and be able to not bog down your friends’ newsfeeds with lightweight content.
How do you add OG to your app? The developer experience is pretty frictionless.
Adding an app to your timeline is a one-click experience “add to timeline” and you’re done. There’s no step two. You also get great screenshots of how the app will look in your timeline.
So what’s going on under the hood?
First step- figure out what activity from your app belongs in the social graph: for a music app- the songs listened to, the stations played. If you create a station for your graduation party how great would that be in the timeline?
You will now find content through patterns (five people are listening to the same song) as well as discovery through friends.
Open graph isn’t just about data, it’s about visual expression. As the app developer you need to figure out what stories people want to tell.
Aggregations- combinations of a query and a layout style. As a developer you can combine queries you write with any layout style you want to use.
Add a timeline button to your app- this will work on the web, mobile, tablet experience, etc.
Over 350 million people use Facebook on mobile. They’re guessing that mobile apps will be the most important in the near future.
How will people find the app now? App discovery will become simpler. If people like it, their friends should see it. Open graph really allows for this. The more engaging your app is, the more people will discover it on Facebook.
Graph rank- artificial discovery system to help decide what activity is the most important to users. It’s also personalized, different relationships allow for different discovery. The higher your graph rank is for me, the higher the chances are that I will see it on Facebook. You will now be able to optimize your app with graph rank data.
Redefine what it means to be social in your industry. The apps that people love the most will be discovered easily on Facebook.
Chris Cox- VP of Product Management
We love summarizing time- “year in review” is a very popular concept
Nick Felton loves to visualize data. He was struck with an idea- what would an annual report look like for one person.
Nick Felton and Ryan Case came to work at Facebook to help create the timeline.
They launched Facebook Memories last year for one hour to the entire user base. They got tremendous feedback and kept working.
Developers will be able to use Timeline TODAY and everyone else will get it in the next few weeks.
Music, movies and TV will be available today as well.
Thanks everyone! This will be the end of my live blogging session. Sorry about the typos!
