Last night, Facebook held the F8 conference live on Facebook. Presented by Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook), F8 is held each year and gives Facebook an opportunity whereby new features and additions to the Facebook platform are announced. This year’s event received a lot of hype and Facebook were thought to be launching some truly amazing features to the service. When Google+ was launched a couple of months ago people thought that they needed something dramatic to get back in the game, well little did we know they have been hard at work behind the scenes and Facebook as we know it will change in ways thought unimaginable by anyone.
Image Source: Yahoo NewsThe event started in comedic fashion with comedian Andy Samberg (Saturday Night Live) providing a spoof introduction to the event. It was a hilarious start to what was to be a very exciting conference indeed. The best part for me had to be his bit about "Classic Zuckdawg", this picture is a must see of it happening on stage.
We will give you a brief overview of some of these new additions and explain how they can make your social experience even more exciting on Facebook and the internet in general. So without further delay, here are the new features.
Timeline
We watched with open jaws as this was unveiled. We have been looking around for a few months now at rumours and reports of what could possibly be happening behind the scenes at Facebook and what they will be bringing to the table, and we honestly didn’t see this one coming.
Timeline to put simply is an archive of your life, and by life, we mean your whole life. The developers at Facebook have been working really hard on algorithms which archive everything you have done since you joined the site. For us that starts from all the way back in 2005. That’s 6 year's worth of content which is available on one website. The thought of that alone is absolutely staggering. We think the best way to demonstrate this is showing you timeline in action:
As you can see this is an archive from Facebook employee Andy Sparks. It shows his timeline from birth right up to the current day.
I think the video of timeline does a very good job of showing you the true power of this addition to Facebook. We think the potentials for this is huge as it can truly immortalize someone, with their whole life being documented on the website. Not only will that information be useful and exciting to your friends, but the possibilities for advertising will also be greater as Facebook can now offer a whole wealth of your information to potential marketers.
The beta period for Timeline starts right now. Facebook will be rolling out the service over the next few weeks, so keep pressing that refresh button (F5) in hope that it comes to your Facebook experience.
Ticker
Many of you may have noticed this little ticker on the top right of your news feed. It rolled out onto our profiles on the 20th of September and has had a very mixed response. So what is it you ask?
Ticker is essentially a real time mini feed of what your friends are doing on Facebook or any of the external services connected to Facebook. You can hover over each feed item to reveal more details and interact with all this content as it happens without leaving the main feed. In effect the content is secondary to the main feed (which has been tweaked itself to be less intrusive) and is just there if it catches your eye. This aspect to it at least is rather nice, and we can see ourselves becoming more interested in its content once Facebook has started taking more notice of your activity on other services such as Spotify, which brings us on to the next video...
Spotify, among other services will enable social and collaborative consumption of media. People will be able to see what you are listening to or watching while you do it. For example, I could be listening to a track and it will appear in my friend's ticker. They could then hover over the track and listen to it themselves and leave a comment about what they think of it.
Final Comments
As you can see there is a lot of exciting things happening on Facebook at the moment. It is happening very fast and there is much more to come by the looks of things, for example the HTML5 App Store (code named “Project Spartan”) is still to be announced.
The overall theme for this new wave of updates seems to be enhanced social interaction with how we use the internet as a whole. This should encourage companies to enhance their social presence with integrated features on their own websites and creating apps and pages on Facebook itself.
Keep your eyes peeled for more news and information on the new Facebook features we have discussed today. If what has happened this evening is anything to go by, there will be a lot more to discuss in the future.