Facebook's f8 Conference (LIVE BLOG): Get The Latest Facebook News
Is Facebook about to get a major profile redesign? All-new ways of listening to music? An iPad app?
We'll know in just a few hours once Facebook kicks off its annual f8 conference, a day-long event at which Facebook showcases the biggest and most noteworthy updates it's rolling out to the social networking site. In years past, Facebook has unveiled such noteworthy additions as Facebook Credits, a "like" button for third-party websites, its controversial Instant Personalization feature, and much more.
This year's f8 keynote kicks off at 10AM PT/ 1PM ET in San Francisco and HuffPostTech will be live blogging the announcement from the event. Get the live updates below, where you can also follow along via Facebook's live video stream from the event.
Afterwards, Facebook will be hosting a series of panels featuring tech notables such as Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, Clear Channel Media and Entertainment chairman Bob Pittman, and Paul Bettner, the VP and general manager of Zynga--check out the full schedule here.
What do you hope to hear from Facebook? Weigh in below.
Zuckerberg ends with a quote that sounds strikingly familiar to what we've heard from Steve Jobs in the past:
"We exist at the intersection of technology and social issues," said Zuckerberg. (Jobs's version: "It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields the results that makes our hearts sing.")
"Just like Intel with Moore's law our development is guided by the idea that every year the amount people want to share is increasing," said Zuckerberg. "So we can look into future and see what might exist and its going to be really really good. "
That's all folks. Check out HuffPostTech for more coverage on all the announcements.
The beta period for Timeline starts immediately: developers will have access to Timeline immediately, some users will be able to sign up for it, and the rest of Facebook's membership will see it rolled out over the next few weeks.
As for the new Open Graph, a subset of apps using the new technology will be available immediately: music, movies, TV and news.
Facebook CTO Bret Taylor is up to talk about how developers build these new social apps.
He's trying to sell developers on the idea that a social app means a successful app.
"The app that's able to set that expectation that everything's social up front--that's the app that's going to win because thats the app that ill see my friends using," Said Taylor.
He also says that the new Open Graph can allow apps to do away with share buttons and instead be inherently social.
"Every time I listen to a song my timeline magically updates," Taylor said in a demonstration of the IHearRadio app.
So every song I listen to on an app would get sent to my Facebook profile page? As much as I love my friends, I'm not sure I want them seeing me playing David Guetta or LMFAO on repeat at 7 AM...
Zuckerberg is highlighting how the new Open Graph will integrate with news organizations' apps and social gaming apps, as well as "lifestyle" apps.
For example: When a user reads a article, that article will appear in his friends' tickers, which then allows friends to click on the article and read it on Facebook via a customized Facebook app designed by the news organization. News organizatons that have created canvas apps for Facebook include the Washington Post, News Corps.'s The Daily, The Huffington Post, The Telegraph, Zuckerberg noted.
Zuckerberg said Facebook had created this new category of social apps "all with the goal of helping you express who you are and discover new things through your friends."
Zuckerberg is highlighting on the new update to Open Graph will work with TV and movies.
"With all the activity that your friends will be able to share you'll discover a lot more content," Zuckerberg said.
He demonstrated a new "social canvas app" from Hulu. Click on an episode from Hulu that's appeared in your news feed because a friend has seen it, and it will immediately start playing, on Facebook.
Netflix will also be one of the companies to take advantage of the new-and-improved Open Graph. Zuckerberg demonstrates how the synchronization between Facebook and Netflix could highlight patterns of activity among friends--for example, Netflix's integration could tell users that four of their friends had watched movies featuring Johnny Depp on Netflix.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has taken the stage.
Facebook users on Spotify listen to more music, of a greater variety, and are twice as likely to pay, says Ek. Both Ek and Zuckerberg are definitely trying to underscore that featuring music on Facebook should make record labels happy because it'll get people to pay up for music.
Having Spotify on Facebook "means we're bringing people back to paying for music again," Eks said.
Facebook is going to change how users share their engagement with apps with their friends.
Share a post and it will enter a friend's news feed, but when a user shares an activity through Facebook's Open Graph, it will go into the new Facebook "Ticker" on the right-hand side of the page.
"Until now there was no socially acceptable way to express lightweight activity," Zuckerberg said.
If a user is listening to a song, for example, an update in the ticker will appear that reads something to the effect of "Bianca Bosker is listening to 'Titanium' by "David Guetta' on Spotify." Friends can discover new content via the ticker, Zuckerberg said, highlighting the format change as a way of providing "real-time serendipity."
"We want to highlight those because we want you to have the opportunity to discover them," Zuckergberg said. "You just see it flow by on the side of your news feed...and you discover a lot of interesting stuff this way."
The Ticker looks almost like a Twitter stream of activity. On Zuckerberg's profile, updates are coming in extremely quickly as friends share that they're listening to different songs.
Zuckerberg has transitioned to talking about apps and an update to Open Graph that will introduce a "completely new class of social apps that weren't possible before."
The idea is to allow users to share a "magnitude more" types of activity than they could before and Zuckerberg said the new version of Open Graph will allow new industries to be social, via apps, in a way that they were not before, specifically highlighting two categories of "media" and "lifestyle" apps.
Facebook's blog post on the new, completely redesigned profile page is up now. See it here.
"In order to make this work we've had to invent a completely new class of apps," Zuckerberg said.
"We want to design a place that feels like your home. Where you tell story online is very personal. You spend a lot of time curating it. We want to make timeline a place you're proud to call your home. It's a completely new aesthetic for Facebook. It gives you the ability to curate all your stories so you can express who you really are," Zuckerberg said.
He's walking through the "Cover Photo" that appears at the top of the timeline, a photo that each user can customize.
He's outlining in more detail the way that users can customize their timelines. People can choose to highlight posts or hide them--hover over any post, and you'll see a star or an "x" appear at the top right hand corner. Clicking the star makes the post more prominent--a photo, for example, will be enlarged to take up both columns of the timeline, rather than only half of the page--while clicking the "x" will remove the post from the timeline.
Users can also select who sees each post in their timeline, limiting certain updates to certain friend groups.
The new profile is drastically different:
Splashed across the top of the page is a "cover photo to express who you are"--a large photo (of Zuckerberg's dog, in the example--and below it, a small thumbnail of your Facebook profile picture. Below it there are a few "tiles" showing apps and pages. To the right there is a timeline organized by year (2011, 2010, 2009, etc). Clicking on a year drops down a list of months, which a user can click to access any posts, photos, and other updates shared during that time.
The content is sorted by time, placed along the timeline on the new profile page, rather than by category. Large-sized photos appear next to status updates, profile changes, maps showing the places a user visited, etc. on the timeline.
"It's a great way to discover all the stuff people have done their whole life," Zuckerberg said.
Users can go back in time and add updates to previous years. Want to add a photo from college? Click on "2004," for example, and you can insert a photo taken that year.
Zuckerberg introduces the new Facebook Profile, "rethought from the ground up."
It's called "Timeline" and it's "all your stories all your apps and a new way to express who you are," said Zuckerberg.
"So if the original profile was the first 5 minutes of your conversation and the stream was the next 15, what I want to show you is the rest," said Zuckerberg. "It's the next few hours of a great in depth conversation, whether with a friend or someone you just met."
He says he's here to announce the "two most exciting things we've been working on for awhile."
"For a long time a lot of people were not sure how long this phenomenon would last," Zuckerberg said. "But I think people now see that social networks will be a ubiquitous tool used by people to stay connected worldwide."
He announced Facebook has reached a new milestone: in a single day the site had half a billion people use Facebook.
Samberg/Zuckerberg said he was "proud to announce some new features on Facebook" including a new section called "I'm not really friends with these people" and the "slow-poke," a poke that would take 24 hours to reach the person poked so you have a "full day to sober up"and realize it wasn't such a good idea.
The real Zuckerberg has joined Samberg onstage. Aaaand Samberg just introduced a third "berg": Jesse Eisenberg, whom Samberg is now imitating.
ANDY SAMBERG?!
Samberg took the stage dressed as Mark Zuckerberg, hoodie and all.
"The trend is toward more sharing. You wake up, you share with your friends. You're out of toothpaste, you share with your friends. You take a big number two--don't share it with your friends, that's for Twitter," "Zuckerberg" said.
Mark Zuckerberg writes in the booklet handed out to all f8 attendees, "This year's f8 is about creating a completely new way for developers to help people tell the story of their lives."
The booklet is customized for each attendee and features her Facebook profile picture on the cover, as well as a collage of photos from her Facebook friends' profiles on the inside covers.
Punctual, f8 is not: We're told we're five minutes away from the start of the keynote, featuring Zuckerberg himself.
| @ nickbilton : At Facebook F8. Guy to girl ratio: 100 to 1. Nerd to non-nerd: 100 to 1. Billionaire to non-billionaire: 1 to 100. http://t.co/rZCVv2FX |
Facebook opened the doors to the main hall where the keynote will be taking place, and people literally started sprinting to their seats. Lots of excitement here.
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The Huffington Post Bianca Bosker First Posted: 09/22/11 11:27 AM ET Updated: 11/22/11 05:12 AM ET