The Facebook f8 Conference Summarized and Simplified
Facebook’s annual f8 conference was on Thursday, September 22nd. CEO, Mark Zuckerberg gave developers and the public of a glimpse of what they’ve had in the works for about a year now.
For those of you who don’t know, the f8 conference is held yearly to showcase the future of Facebook and how companies/developers can use it to enhance users’ social networking experience.
In this year’s edition, here’s a summary of what happened – simplified.
First of all, ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ was introduced to the audience where he explained new features like the ‘Slow Poke’, the ‘I’m Not Really Friends With These People’ section and how the new features
are to promote user engagement and not growth. By ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ I mean Andy Samberg doing his impression of the Facebook CEO. Below is the video of the monologue which gave the audience a little laugh, and no, the slow poke isn’t really a new feature.
After all that, Zuckerberg began the actual conference and started to explain the new features. Here he revealed that for the first time since Facebook launched in 2006, they had half a billion people using the site at the same time.
After this, he went through the evolution of the Facebook profile from 2006 until now where he explained that the company had been working on a new feature called the timeline for a year. He described the timeline as
“All your stories, all your apps and a new way to express who you are… [It's a] great way to understand everything about who a person is without having met them at all”
- Mark Zuckerberg
The timeline would show your life on Facebook, right from when you were born (if you choose to upload a picture of that) up until now. Instead of scrolling down and having to click through older posts each time, you can simply go back by year and feature the most important stories of your life so they don’t blend in with the rest of them or remove the things you don’t want seen on there, like those drunken pictures of you from 2009.
Zuckerberg showed a preview of the timeline on a browser and a mobile browser, both pretty cool if I may add. He showed the preview on an iPhone, so no word on what it will look on on BlackBerry OS.
Apart from having timeline on your profile, you can also have it as a map where you can see everywhere you’ve been since Facebook let users add their location to posts. You can have it as a report, where you can see everything you’ve done using an app. It reminds me of this video I saw a few months back about one’s life on Facebook.
The Zuck went on to explain the Open Graph feature for developers. Now instead of ‘liking a book’, you can ‘read a book’ and see what your friends are doing too. It’s meant to “help you discover new things through your friends”, he said. Using Spotify, he explained how you can see the songs your friends are listening to in the ticker as they listen to them. things you would see on the feed for example would be, “Faridah is listening to Fall in Love by D’Banj on Spotify” and you can click on the update and listen to the song. This he labeled as “real time serendipity”. Having it all in the ticker prevents you from having to have the clutter on your news feed.
Through that, you can not only discover music through Spotify but your friends can as well. Music you’ve listened to will also have a timeline view. Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, expressed how having users more engaged with music will make them more likely to buy music.
Movie and TV apps like Netflix are also using open graph to enhance users’ experience, you can watch movies directly from your friends’ activity.
The open graph will also enhance the way you read news, the way you play games by showing what you’re playing and who you’re playing with. It will enhance your experience with lifestyle apps like Nike+ by showing your friends how far you run, your pace, when you’ve reached a goal etc. Zuckerberg described the open graph as a way to provide users with
Frictionless experiences, real-time serendipity, finding new patterns”
Back to the timeline, Vice President of Product, Chris Cox said “the timeline is for you to remember just how much you’ve forgotten was there”. Scrolling down lets you view things like events you’ve attended, places you’ve been, photos you’ve posted. They don’t have to be buried now under ongoing pages of ‘Older Posts’.
[Timeline] is yours to fill out – Chris Cox, VPP
The timeline is set to roll out to users from September 29th onwards. However, if you’re really curious to see what it looks like and play around with it, we’ve got you covered.
What do you think about it? Do you think Facebook should quit changing? Are you excited about it? Drop us a comment and tell.
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