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Sep 23rd 2011, 14:47 by M.G. | SAN FRANCISCO
AT FACEBOOK, they like to call it Zuckerberg s Law . This is the notion,
promoted by Facebook s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, that the amount of stuff that
people share roughly doubles every year. The social network is certainly doing
its utmost to ensure that folk end up revealing more about themselves, whether
they like it or not. On September 22nd Facebook, which now has over 800m users,
unveiled a couple of significant changes designed to get people to share far
more about their life histories and their interests in music, film and other
areas.
The first shift involves people s profile pages, which hold biographical
details about them. In the next few weeks Facebook plans to roll out a redesign
of these pages. The new-look profile, dubbed Timeline, will allow users to keep
far more of the material they share over the network in an easy-to-use
historical format and to add photos and other content from their past more
easily. Facebook s goal is to get people to create a complete online archive of
their lives that they constantly curate.
At the same time, the firm is promoting a new generation of social apps .
Users will be encouraged to report to their friends in real time via these apps
that they are, say, listening to a piece of music, cooking a particular kind of
meal or watching a specific film. Their friends will then be able to click on,
say, a music app and listen to the same piece of music. The company has been
working with a group of firms, including Spotify, an online-music outfit,
Netflix, a video-streaming service, and a range of news organisations
(including the Washington Post and The Economist), to flesh out the offerings
it will need to make this new feature take off.
The underlying aim here is clear: Facebook wants to deepen its insight into
what Mr Zuckerberg calls the open graph a picture of all of the links that
people have with other folk and with stuff such as songs, books and articles
that they find appealing. The more that Facebook can learn about people s lives
and interests, the better positioned it will be to target advertising at them
and to persuade companies to use it to market their wares. With an initial
public offering looming next year, it needs to show that it can keep driving up
its ad revenue.
The move is also designed to keep Facebook in front of rivals such as Google s
social network, Google+, which this week announced that it was throwing open
its doors to the world after a period of beta testing. Some observers think
that Facebook s move could actually help Google+ by encouraging it to focus on
areas of differentiation from the social-networking Goliath. Perhaps, but it
will be hard to see how Google can resist following Facebook s lead if the
network s social-app initiative pays off.
At this week s Facebook developer conference, where the changes were unveiled,
Mr Zuckerberg predicted that they would also disrupt many different industries,
with the winners being those firms who wholeheartedly embrace the notion of
social sharing first. Reed Hastings, Netflix s chief executive, came on stage
with Mr Zuckerberg to say that initially the firm had been wary of sharing data
about its users with Facebook via a social app, but had come round to the view
that this made sense given the potential power of social connectivity to boost
its overall business. (Netflix plans to roll out a social app on Facebook in
all of the countries where it offers a streaming service except America, where
a privacy law currently prohibits the sharing of information about movies a
person rents. It hopes this law will soon be repealed by America s Congress.)
To some, all this smacks of MySpace s ultimately disastrous attempt to turn
itself into an online hub where people would come to discover all sorts of
different content. But MySpace s blunder was to try to force-feed content to
users by completely cluttering their homepages with links to it. With its
elegant Timeline design, Facebook is less likely to fall into the same trap.
However, it could still come a-cropper if it is not careful. The more
information that people share about themselves with the site, the greater the
danger of another big blow-up over privacy. Facebook says users will be offered
the option to set privacy controls as they sign up to each social app. That is
welcome, but it remains to be seen how robust these controls will be in
practice.
Facebook could also face a backlash from folk who worry that the social network
is now going to have even more of a Big Brother-like capacity to monitor
everything going on in their lives. Mr Zuckerberg made clear this week that
people who want to keep their existing, more basic profile pages will still be
forced to transition to the new Timeline one. Perhaps Zuckerberg s Law should
really state that sharing less is not an option.
New Facebook Features: What you need to know
By Taylor Hatmaker, Tecca | Today in Tech Thu, Sep 22, 2011
Today in a keynote address at Facebook's 2011 F8 Developers conference, CEO
Mark Zuckerberg revealed the social giant's ambitious next steps. As rumors
swirled prior to the event, reports suggested that Facebook might have big
plans to socialize the web even further. In an era when few websites aren't
littered with Facebook's ubiquitous Like button, it was hard to imagine what
the company's vision for a yet more hypersocial web would look like. Read on to
know what changes are in store for the world's biggest social network and its
800 million users.
Timelines will change the look of your Facebook identity
1. Timelines
While the profile page has been the crux of Facebook since its inception in
2004, the addition of the News Feed steered the social site in a somewhat
different direction. Rather than focusing on static pages where our friends
represented themselves, the site emphasized Twitter-like real-time updates, so
we could follow along with our friends' lives as they scroll past. With a brand
new feature called the Timeline, Facebook wants to return to that more static
identity without sacrificing that kind of real-time update that keeps a social
site fresh and relevant.
The goal of the Timeline is to allow you to curate your Facebook profile page
with the events, photos, and updates that matter. Previously, clicking over to
a friend's profile page shows a snapshot of their identity that is largely
moored in very recent events like status updates, wall posts, and only their
newest tagged pictures. As the Timeline replaces the traditional Facebook page,
you can prune your profile to reflect what you feel represents your social
identity best, which naturally might not be what you had for lunch.
The reinvented profile page will prevent your important personal information
from slipping off the page as your newest status updates pour in. With an
almost blog-like, photo-heavy layout, you can pick and choose from your past
updates, ideally making the Timeline "an easy way to rediscover the things you
shared, and collect all your best moments in a single place."
The Ticker provides a quick glance at the most recent news
2. Ticker
If Timeline is meant to breathe new life into the ailing profile page,
Facebook's new Ticker feature targets the here and now. By splitting the
Facebook experience into two streams Timelines for our richer, more static
profiles and Ticker for small updates like what we had for breakfast the
company will attempt to manage its signal-to-noise ratio.
While the Timeline can add a summary of activity from a single app like
Spotify, for instance the Ticker will display each micro-action: a song you
just liked or what album you're playing right now. The Ticker will be a
"lightweight stream of everything that's going on around you," so the social
network isn't quite so clogged up with the small stuff, like auto-generated
status updates from apps like FarmVille.
3. Apps
Facebook's overhaul will have a heavy emphasis on the mobile experience after
all, over 350 million people use Facebook on mobile devices each month. Knowing
this number will only go up, Facebook has optimized the visual design of
Timelines for mobile rather than displaying a stream of tiny text updates
below a profile page, Timelines will offer a more visually dynamic experience
one rich with the photos and apps that we choose to add to our timeline, which
will appear in large boxes. Beyond the visual redesign through Timelines, you
can expect many apps and web services to pop up with an "Add to Timeline"
button Facebook's more identity-centric Like Button 2.0.
Tons of quality apps at your fingertips
4. Social news and entertainment
Beyond the profile tweaks, Facebook introduced a new kind of socially curated
reading and a partnership with Yahoo! News. After enabling the feature, you can
see what your friends have read across Yahoo! News' vast network, as well as
view a history of what you've read. The new feature will closely integrate with
Yahoo!, going above and beyond the action of simply "liking" a story and
watching it pop up in your news feed.
Facebook also announced close integration with Spotify, the hit on-demand music
streaming service that recently graced the ears of American music lovers. Users
can see what their friends are listening to on Spotify via the Ticker, and
stream songs without ever leaving the site. Beyond music and news, Facebook has
partnered with Netflix to weave the streaming video service into the social
network a feature Netflix fans have been anxiously awaiting for some time.
Like Spotify, the Netflix integration will be something of a discovery engine.
You can browse your own Facebook friends for ideas about what series to start
with next, or what new movies might be worth a watch. Facebook also announced a
similar deal with streaming video site Hulu.
5. Privacy
Facebook's new emphasis on a "frictionless experience" means that users might
want to read the fine print more closely than ever. Instead of thinking of
authorizing an app as granting it "permission," social sharing will be posed as
a positive part of an app itself not a nuisance, like many of us likely
imagine it. Authorize an app and it will operate in the background, sharing
your activities across Facebook and shaping both your social profile through
both the Ticker, the Timeline, and the News Feed.
But letting the apps do all the social sharing for us can have plenty of
unintended consequences. Depending on how far each app takes auto-sharing, we
might be posting status updates that we didn't even remember authorizing. Now
that Facebook will tie in to the music and entertainment sites we care about
most, be cautious about what you allow, lest your Facebook friends find out
your every last guilty pleasure from the 80s.
Broadcasting your bad taste is one thing, but many mobile check-in and
photo-sharing apps integrate geodata about where you are. If you've authorized
these apps to communicate freely with Facebook, you might end up letting the
world pinpoint your location via GPS. To stay safe, lock down your privacy
settings and read before you click, now more than ever.
This article originally appeared on Tecca