Today was the Facebook developers conference F8. Ware Mark Zuckerberg showed use some of the new things that developers will be able to use to give there users a more social experience. The keynote was focused on three key things. The open graph, instant social, and making development simple. First off they announced as of 4/21/10 they have 400 million registered people on Facebook and 36 million use the site on a mobile device.
Mark talked a lot about this thing he called the Open Graph. The Open Graph is taking your Social Graph and opening it to other places. One one the examples they used was Yelp which you can see in this video below:
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From the video you just saw you can get a bit of what the Open Graph is and how it can be used. New plug-ins where announced as well, these plug-ins will help to make sites more social by adding a news feed so people can see what others have said about a article on a site. There is a like button that you can add to your site and it shows the user if other people they know have liked whatever content is as well. The last one is a tool bar that adds all that and Facebook chat to a web site but just as a bar at the bottom of a web page. All this Mark says will work without a user logging in.
Another thing that was talked about was some changes for developers so that Facebook applications can see what you are doing in real time. So lets say you play Farmville plugged in to your account if you update your profile from being in relationship to being single, as soon as you change that Zinga knows. Now that doesn't really seem that bad since lets face it these apps know probably more about us then we do. But what I think this info is going to be use for is ads so apps can have more relevant ads.
Pretty much everything that was talked about in the keynote can be used today and some of it is already implemented in sites like CNN Money, Yelp, and Pandora. I have a few screen shots:
You will see more of this I'm sure in the coming weeks other sites will add all this to there sites. The hole idea is to make user feel less alone when they join a site and to make it essayer for them to find there friends if they too are a member already and what better way to do that with then Facebook.
Some people today might say today was the day Facebook became Google scary. I for one think these new feachers are good and that someone had to do it, and since there is no one with enough umf be hind them to do it Facebook is the only ones who can do it and keep it around.