Tectonic Shift: What You Should Know About the New Facebook
By Rob Scott
September 23, 2011
September 23, 2011
- We’ve received a flood of interesting articles and posts about newly announced changes to Facebook that emerged from yesterday’s F8 developer’s conference. You can check out the submissions stream on ETCentric to access all the write-ups and opinions, but in the meanwhile, the following provides a a quick snapshot…
- Timeline: Your entire Facebook life. It condenses information the further back in time you go, allows you to navigate specific years, and provides the option to feature, add or remove items. It is important to note however, this is not merely a new feature. It will completely replace current profiles, according to TheNextWeb.
- Ticker: This is a status feed that updates your activities, but is separate from your status updates that appear in the Newsfeed. This feature is now especially important to keep an overwhelming amount of information from coming through the new Open Graph Apps. “The Ticker is Facebook’s assault on Twitter,” reports Gizmodo. “Facebook is hoping that the tiny aspects of your life that you currently share on Twitter, you’ll be more likely to share on Facebook. One site for all your social networking.”
- Open Graph Apps: Includes a variety of apps such as Spotify and Hulu that automatically update your Ticker and Timeline based on the settings you create for each app. Friends see what video you’re watching, what music you’re listening to, what games you’re playing, and more. This feature is available now, while Timeline will take a few more weeks.
- It is worth mentioning that since music, news, video and more will be shared with friends and family, it may also be shared with marketers. Open Graph will enable an ecosystem for developers. Your Facebook profile will become “the story of your life” which is written for you in real time as you curate your personal information and your use of apps. Similarly, you will learn more about your friends. And all this personal information will be used to serve you with micro-targeted ads. People will be given the option of privacy even though most will probably not alter the default settings.
- Social Sharing: By essentially creating a discovery engine for all your apps, Facebook hopes to dramatically change how we interact and share media electronically (through what Mark Zuckerberg calls “serendipitous discovery”). The Gizmodo post features a video on social sharing that provides a great view of how the Open Graph app sharing works.
- Prior to the F8 event, eMarketer published a report forecasting that Facebook would double its global revenue to $4.27 billion in 2011.