Facebook Platform
Facebook F8 amplifies the Facebook Platform: Like, Timeline, News Feed, API; http://eicker.at/FacebookPlatform
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Messages
Facebook starts integrating eMail, chat, SMS to its in–house Facebook Messages app; http://eicker.at/FacebookMessages
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Gerrit Eicker
Seligstein, Facebook: “Today I’m excited to announce the next evolution of Messages. You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time. You shouldn’t have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message. – We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they’re on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation. … Relatively soon, we’ll probably all stop using arbitrary ten digit numbers and bizarre sequences of characters to contact each other. We will just select friends by name and be able to share with them instantly. We aren’t there yet, but the changes today are a small first step. – We’ll be launching Messages and email addresses gradually and making it available to everyone over the next few months. Once you receive an invitation, you’ll be able to get started and also invite your friends to join you.”
Facebook Messages: “Messages has always been the place for private exchanges on Facebook, and this won’t change. With the new Messages, now you have easy access to all your private conversations with your friends in one place. – The new Messages interface not only displays the Facebook messages you exchange with friends, but it also interweaves your chats, texts and emails (should you choose to create an @facebook.com address). It’s a central place to control all of your private communication, both on and off Facebook: faster interaction, integrated communication, smart filtering, revamped search, adding people to group conversations, forwarding, unsubscribing, or removing yourself from a conversation, sending attachments … Unlike traditional messaging systems, where you have no control over who can message you once someone has your contact information, Facebook Messages lets you decide how you connect with friends and the people around you. … By default, anyone on Facebook can send you a message, and if you set up a Facebook email address, anyone outside of Facebook can send you email. Email from friends and their friends goes directly to your main Messages folder, and everything else goes to the Other folder within your Messages.
IF: “Regardless of where the message is delivered, it will appear in the thread which notifications lead back to. Users can trigger through the interface whether they want the message to be sent to a specific medium of a friend, such as SMS to their phone. Otherwise, it will be routed automatically. For instance, if a user is online when they’re sent a message, they’ll receive it as a Chat. … As for security, instead of relying on a ‘security by obscurity’ method of inbox privacy, users will have control of who can send them messages. They can change their privacy settings to bounce back messages from those they don’t want to receive messages from. … CEO Mark Zuckerberg says this is not a Gmail killer, and that Facebook doesn’t expect people to immediately switch all their email to the product.”
TC: “Facebook has created three key things: Seamless messaging, conversation history, and a social inbox. Essentially, they’ve created a way to communicate no matter what format you want to use: email, chat, SMS – they’re all included. ‘People should share however they want to share,’ engineer Andrew Bosworth said. – All of this messaging is kept in a single social inbox. And all of your conversation history with people is kept. … Right now, this system is merging four main things: SMS, IM, email, and Facebook messages. Zuckerberg said that they’d consider other tech, like VoIP in the future. But right now this is mainly about consolidating text-based messages.”
TNW: “Facebook is not calling this an email killer, it is ‘a messaging system that uses email.’ Facebook also does not anticipate people leaving their regular email accounts. However, the company does seem to anticipate that people over time will switch over more and more to Facebook messaging. Oh, and kids who get on Facebook before email? Who else wants to bet that they never get a normal webmail account?”
AF: “Zuckerberg: ‘All of this will enable simple, real-time messaging. We are also launching the ‘social inbox’. Since you have entered your friends lists and your friends have entered their friends lists, we can do some extremely effective filtering for you. While there are existing systems that filter out junk, there are various types of junk. Up until now, the primary way to handle messaging is through the development of white lists. At Facebook, you get that automatically. Not only do you get that, but you also can get messages filtered from people who are ‘friends of your friends’. The default experience is ‘high signal’ messages that are really personal to you, and then we can have another inbox which is for the lower signal content. … We want it to have IMAP support. It already speaks email protocol, however having it sync with other email systems is on the roadmap.‘”
RWW: “Zuckerberg tells an anecdote about his girlfriend’s sister – a high-schooler. Conversations with high-schoolers ‘make me feel old.’ High-schoolers say ‘we don’t use email. It’s too slow.’ … Will there be ads? The advertising will look the same as it does in the rest of Facebook. Zuckerberg says there’s a ‘huge difference’ between Facebook’s ad system and others. … Are you capturing the information about non-Facebook users? ‘Yes, in some way we do that,’ says Zuckerberg.”
TC: “Again, if you extrapolate that out, that means the end of email. It sounds as if Zuckerberg is just tip-toeing around calling for the death of a system that a lot of people currently use. Obviously, such a claim would cause a huge uproar (considering that there’s a huge uproar when Facebook changes a font size, the idea of Zuckerberg calling for the death of email is truly terrifying). – He also specifically talked about posts like ours calling this new system a ‘Gmail-killer’. ‘I think Gmail is a really good product,’ Zuckerberg said. But again, he’s essentially saying that it’s a good product that future generations are using less and less.”
TNW: “The fact of the matter is this, from where I’m looking: What Facebook did today could easily be done in Gmail with 3 Gmail Labs plugins. Oh, and then I don’t have to move over to Facebook. … Further, from the demonstration that we saw on stage, it’s simply real-time chat. That sounds suspiciously like a trimmed-down version of Google Wave, to us. Maybe Google was a bit too hasty in killing the Wave, after all? … In all, what Facebook announced today, again just appears to be a polished version of Google products… but with fewer options. If you’re already a heavy Facebook user, then maybe it’s a good thing for you. If you’re not, though, it’s likely a change that will be far too much of a pain in the tail to use… especially if you’re coming from Gmail.”
Gerrit Eicker 07:13 on 26. September 2011 Permalink |
Forbes: “[T]here’s no question – Facebook remains the most ambitious, most technologically sophisticated, fastest-moving Internet company. The changes announced [at F8] were as big as anything the company has ever done – to turn Facebook into a real-time engine for seeing what your friends are doing and joining them right now… The changes are all big, but perhaps the most interesting is that Facebook is becoming a real-time communication service. … Longtime tech pundit and thinker Esther Dyson posted on Twitter today that Facebook was launching the ‘semantic Web’ without calling it that. Good, because hardly anyone ever understood what that meant. … In order to launch these real-time features for its platform, Facebook needed a way for users to access them. That’s why it launched the ticker earlier this week. … The best way to think of Facebook is as infrastructure – the social infrastructure of the Internet. Zuckerberg believes Facebook has far more to gain over the long term by reinforcing itself as a universal platform than by any other means. … Granted, it is potentially problematic for one company to own an essential piece of Net infrastructure.”
SG: “Without a doubt, [the] major keynote at f8 2011 showed Facebook to be making some major changes in the very near future. Starting with a whole new layout and set of functions they’re calling ‘Timeline‘ and moving through app enhancements that have the potential to change the way we use apps on all platforms, we’ve got a guide here for you, the Facebook user, to easily understand what you’ve got in store. This is Facebook as it will exist starting at the tail end of 2011. … There is a new class of application on Facebook now called Open Graph. This class is defined by three principles: Frictionless experiences, Realtime serendipity, and Finding patterns. The goal here is to have subject matter (games, music, video, social apps) spread to friends via friends in as enjoyable a manner as possible.”
AF: “According to Zuck[erberg]… ‘A record 500 million people used Facebook the same day. We’re connected now. The next era will be defined by the social apps that use these connections. … But there’s more to us, to our deepest conversations. You want to express the story of your life in terms of the most important and meaningful parts of your life – this is the heart of your Facebook experience.’ … Facebook has created a new class of apps to deal with the next version of open graph. Facebook’s mission is to make world more open and connected. They want you to have a more personal experience. … Now you’ll be able to eat a meal, hike a trail, and so on, and the activity shows up in the news feed. This means Facebook is adding verbs to the connections in the social graph. … GraphRank may be the new EdgeRank. What do I want to see in the news feed versus someone’s timeline? Different types of relationships work differently – work friends versus family, for example. And this is probably going to integrate the new friends lists and family categorizations.”
Guardian: “While Facebook is keen for its users to stay on the site for as long as possible, Zuckerberg has consistently emphasised that the site is a ‘distribution platform’ to other media companies. – The social network has moved to strengthen its ties with media partners in recent months as it moves closer to its hotly anticipated initial public offering. Facebook was recently valued at $66.5bn on secondary markets. Its global revenues are expected to reach $4.3bn in 2011, up from $2bn in 2010, according to the research firm eMarketer. … [Zuckerberg] wants Facebook to be the centre of your web experience. That’s the purpose of the redesign of the ‘timeline’ – the river of experiences recounted by your friends. Rather than being a river, he’s offering the chance to organise it, with the photos and videos. … The key is that he wants Facebook to become the de facto authentication mechanism of the web.”
Green, TC: “I was one of the first people to join Facebook in February of 2004, and launched one of the inaugural applications on the platform in May 2007. The new Facebook profile and Open Graph announced…, along with the launch of smart friend lists last week, is going to usher in a new era of the Facebook platform. And I believe entire industries will potentially be revolutionized by social, from travel to reviews to health to e-commerce, and of course charity. … I am confident we will see major sectors, from music to reviews to commerce, revolutionized by authentic friend-to-friend interactions. We are fortunate at Causes to have a big start in one of the largest markets around, the $300 billion giving market. It is anyone’s guess if the other major categories will go social with their current leading companies, or if entirely new ones will emerge, like Zynga in gaming. Either way, it will be a fun ride.”
RWW: “Facebook significantly scaled up the amount of information it tracks about you – and many millions of other people. The once humble status update field has been expanded to include 6 types of ‘life events.’ You now automatically share data about what you’re reading or listening to. … Here’s a quick summary of what’s changed: A new Subscribe button, allowing you to follow people you aren’t friends with, plus filter the amount of information you get from current friends. Improved friends lists – easier way to group people into lists, including via semi-automated ‘smart lists.’ A News Ticker that streams a constant flow of user updates in a sidebar (on top of your chat bar). A newspaper-like relevancy filter for your Facebook homepage. Instant sharing of what you read, listen to and watch. A new Timeline profile (a colorful history of you and your ‘life events’).”