Thursday, September 22, 2011

Facebook's F8 2011 Developers Conference

Facebook's annual developers conference (F8) is taking place today and it is chock full of new innovations that will be made available to the public at large immediately. Marc Zuckerberg said the beta period starts immediately.

Facebook has reengineered the profile page into what they are now calling "Timeline". Timeline allows you to create your own life-story timeline. It resolves the problem of activity and experiences on our current profile page that falls off at the bottom of the page, but is still very important in telling our story. Timeline allows you to capture all that activity and present it in chronological order with as much or as little detail as you would like to present. The comparison was made to scrapbooking but on a digital platform. I really like Timeline and I think it will definitely revolutionize social networking. At first, FB users will balk and complain, but as the newness settles in, I think the experience will be a good one.

The other major announcement was the new class of social applications (App's) that can now be developed as a result of changes to Facebook's Open Graph. These changes will allow developers to create app's that will integrate with the user’s social experience on Facebook. If a user downloads a music app, and proceeds to listen to their favorite band, others that are part of the user’s network will be able to see what band the user is listening to and listen to the same musical experience in real time. The dynamics that this creates is that you will start to discover other individuals who have similar musical taste, but even better, you will now have the opportunity to experience different musical genres that will open you up to new musical experiences. These app's will be available for music, movies, TV, and news immediately. These app's will be driven by "pattern aggregation" and as a result will reveal and share a lot of similarities among users. Each user will be in total control of what they share and who they share it with.

Facebook feels that as a society we are at the crossroad of technology and social problems. Timeline and Open Graph applications will definitely take our complete social networking experience to another level. A lot of what was discovered was attributed to "the spirit of accidents." These are innovations that are birthed as a result of stumbling into something and pursuing it until it reveals itself fully.

If you want to experience F8 for yourself, click on the following link and you will be able to stream it:
 

Written by Terence H. Biggs, Jr.
Founder & President
Marketplace Dynamics, LLC

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