At Facebook’s core is the social graph; people and the connections they have to everything they care about. In the recent f8 conference, Facebook introduced three significant updates that will bring us all closer to this goal of making the world a more open and connected place. First, it is the announcement of Timeline, where we can now tell our life story with a new profile. Secondly, it is the extension of the Open Graph to include arbitrary actions and objects created by 3rd party apps and enabling these apps to integrate deeply into the Facebook experience. Lastly, powering our news feed based on user activity and engagement is the Graph Rank.
When Facebook launched the Like button at last year’s f8, it quickly became one of the most popular and powerful tools on the Internet. According to Facebook CTO Bret Taylor, Open Graph is the most significant update to the Facebook Platform since it launched in 2007, expanding the capabilities and opportunities for social apps, from music to TV to news to lifestyle apps such as cooking, fitness, and travel. I will explore in this blog post how these three updates can help create a deep, exciting connection between you and your users, and drive new users to your app.
Introducing Timeline
Timeline is a page on which you can put the events and activity that matter most to you. Possibly the biggest revamp of the Facebook Profile is the ability to choose a large, unique image for a cover photo on the top of your Timeline. Mark Zuckerberg said the cover photo would provide a deeper insight into users’ personalities, as this will be the first thing people see when they visit your Timeline.
Here is a slideshow to illustrate the new Timeline. This is where you can tell your story from beginning, to middle, to now. “If the original profile was the first five minutes of your conversation, and the stream is the next 15 (minutes), then I want to show you the rest,” Zuckerberg said before introducing Timelines.
Facebook provides some of the most important stuff that you’d want to put there, like photos and major life events - but those types of content are just the start. With the Open Graph, apps can enable people to truly make their Timelines their own.
App Discovery
For example, Darren likes to cook. He wants to share the recipes he cooks on his profile, and at the same time, discover his friends’ recipes. This is where Facebook apps come in. And Darren, our developer at iPlatform, has created an Open Graph app that will make his Timeline the personal, expressive page he believes it can be.
As people add apps to their Timeline, friends will be able to easily discover and connect to your app in just a few clicks, as they see it on not only each other’s Timelines, but in news feed, or the newly launched Ticker. Recent, “lightweight” activity shows up in the Ticker, while more substantial updates appear in the news feed.
With the launch of the new Open Graph Beta to all Facebook developers, new apps allow users to add activity to Timelines without getting prompts to share with friends. Using the new Music dashboard as an example, users can see playlists appear on Timelines - apps will allow more users to discover new things from their friends in real-time.
Graph Rank & New App Analytics
Clearly f8 has cemented the fact that apps will be helping to power a new Facebook experience. Facebook announced Graph Rank, a system that manages the discovery of Open Graph activity. This will help to show more engaging content to users while helping app users make better apps. To optimise for Graph Rank, better Open Graph analytics will be shown to app developers, as shown in the below screenshot taken from Facebook.
We are excited about the new opportunities presented, all in the name of enabling more people to discover and learn more about everything than ever before.
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