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Facebook F8 announces big changes

Christopher Park

Christopher Park

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Facebook has one of the largest market shares in social content.  The service has evolved in huge steps over the years with both welcomed changes and some displeasure in how much content was shared beyond friends’ lists.

2011’s Facebook F8 announced three new features that can be combined into two main new updates to the service. Both updates affect the user, but from the announcement, Facebook is both trying to simplify and unify the user experience in an easy viewable package.



New Profile Timeline

The main change is a user interface (UI) revision of the profile page in Facebook.  Renamed “Timeline”, the new profile works to improve the access of older content, something Facebook recognized as an existing issue.

Their reasoning, explained by Mark Zuckerberg, was that there is a lot of older content that was lost in the current layout of the Facebook profile page.  Having to click “Older Posts” and scroll through the content was poorly organized system.  With Timeline, user profiles are streamlined into a simplified layout by year.  Users are now able to click on years and see content in a much easier and quicker format.

The Timeline layout features content in two main categories – important major content marked by blue dots and lesser unimportant content marked by grey dots.  Both can be featured on the new profile, but the layout is widget based.

Since privacy in content is still a major concern for many users, all content on the new profile timeline can be controlled by the user.  This ensures an amount of privacy in published content.

Content can also be filtered in different categories like photo timelines or location timelines.  The new layout also includes the news feed (named Ticker) which was launched with an update earlier in the week that contains smaller updates not considered as important.  Overall, the new layout appears to function with the purpose of making searching for specific content easier while making the profile more visually active.

Apps are everywhere

Facebook’s focus on the new profile timeline also connects applications in a much more intensive way.  Apps are able to have recent summaries at the top of the profile, supply summary reports of activity, and contain the ability to add apps into the timeline.

The other large feature update was to Facebook’s Open Graph platform.

Everyone knows Facebook’s “Like.”  A new addition to “Like” was the new ability to add verbs to these status updates.  User can now perform actions in conjunction with previous nouns and be much more specific in their descriptions.

Facebook also announced two new social app categories that they would be working with: media and lifestyle.  The idea behind these new application categories would be to help the discovery of new content, not from ads, but from other friends.

Zuckerberg presented three goals with the Open Graph platform.

Frictionless Experience

Many apps include the “Share on Facebook” intrusive notification.  The frictionless experience allows users to give permissions to apps to automatically post to a user’s Facebook through the Ticker rather than the user’s wall.

Realtime Serendipity

Facebook is focusing a lot on the Ticker and its usage in the update.  In combination to the frictionless experience, apps will be updating statuses in the Ticker.  Friends will then be able to play the same song through the music service.  The idea is to open more content to users through recommendations of friends.

Finding Patterns and Activity

With Open Graph and applications, there is a greater desire for aggregation of data.  Finding patters and activity is geared towards the summary of content.

Facebook also had guest speakers from Spotify and Netflix talking about the greater integration of applications on the Facebook platform.  Other partners that were directly mentioned were Yahoo News, Nike+, and Foodspotting.  The Open Graph platform looks like it’s going to contain a lot more content than previously expected though the many different media partners that Facebook is developing with.

Strangely enough, what used to be “Share on Facebook” has become “Add to Timeline.”

The big changes in the Facebook experience look to be positive ones.  The aggregation of all the possible content on Facebook was something that was forgotten, but with the new Timeline feature, it is possible that users will start connecting more to other users and applications.  Facebook’s changes will also be fully integrated into the Android and iOS mobile applications as the service rolls out.

The rollout of Timeline is first in a beta given to developers first with controlled expansion over the next few weeks for all users.  New apps in music, movies, TV, and news were launched today as they mainly focus with connection to the Ticker rather than the Timeline profile.

Christopher Park

Christopher Park

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