Facebook’s f8 Announcements and what it means for Social Games. Facebook Heralds a New Age of Social Networking. TL;DR: You didn’t think it was possible, but you’ll soon bring even more of your life on Facebook.
And you’ll love it in spite of the privacy concerns, because it’ll give you more and cooler interaction with your friends. If you like sharing bits of text (most people do), you’ll love sharing tastes and activities and you’ll never look back. Part I: The Gist I was watching the Facebook keynote yesterday, where Mark Zuckerber was giving the details of what is probably the most ambitious update to his social network yet. Midway through, I stopped everything and went on Google+ to deliver this eloquent quote: “Zuckerberg is seriously blowing my mind right now”. Here’s why: he found a way to bring even more of our real lives into Facebook. Part II: Details Part I was the general idea and the main part of the article. The thought process that brought about the new Facebook Going deeper 1) The New Feed Until now, the norm on every social network has been the good old linear feed. Yup. Coming Soon: Facebook’s Automatic “Read” Button.
A few days ago, leading up to f8, we noted that we heard from a source that Facebook would soon be expanding their buttons offerings beyond the Like button.
Specifically, we heard that “Read” “Listen” and “Watch” buttons were coming. But today during the f8 keynote, Facebook didn’t have anything to say about those. But that doesn’t mean they’re not coming. Actually, they are. I had the chance to sit down with Facebook CTO Bret Taylor after the keynote and he told me that a new “Read” button would be coming within the next couple of weeks. Unlike the Like button which gives you a way to explicitly share individual pieces of content, this Read plug-in (and presumably, Watch, Listen, etc, plugins) would allow third-parties to add a single button to their site to enable some of the automatic actions Facebook unveiled today.
To be clear, this button will be totally opt-in for users. Share Buttons? Ha. Facebook Just Schooled The Internet. Again. After last year’s f8 keynote, my initial thought was pretty straightforward: I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet.
Between the Like Button, the Open Graph, and the Open Graph API, I felt like we were shifting from Google being the fabric of the web, to Facebook taking over. A few days later, a now unpaid blogger declared it: The Age of Facebook. Both of these declarations pissed a lot of people off. Facebook is the new AOL! Walled garden! For the past year, Facebook has been working on the beautiful re-imagining of the Profile, which they call “Timeline“. Because of this impact, some people will undoubtedly hate it.