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Mark Zuckerberg and his team revealed dramatic changes to Facebook at its f8 conference, altering the profile page so it becomes a timeline of your life, and opening up the Facebook platform to new types of applications that allow users to automatically share more types of content – music, TV, video, newspapers – in real time, all without having to leave the Facebook environ.
Partnerships with content providers like Spotify, the Guardian, Netflix, Zynga, and The Washington Post are the first steps in bringing the new content directly into Facebook rather than having users go to the content. As well as Sharing and Liking, users can Read, Listen and Watch.
CEO Zuckerberg is signaling his wish to establish Facebook as the hub for users’ diverse web activities. While the timeline, and other additions and changes such as the ticker and newsfeed (which has dedicated users howling in anger or dismay) are substantial front end changes and take Facebook way beyond Twitter and Google, it is the back of house developments that are more significant from a business perspective.
The first five years were about getting people signed up and putting connections in place said Zuckerberg, the next will be about applications and the depth of engagement. To enable this the company has created a new class of Open Graph applications and this is the mechanism that allows users to share what they are watching, listening to and reading in real time.
There are positive implications for advertisers as businesses can create Open Graph applications to expose their offerings to Facebook users. As users move around in the new Facebook environment and applications, their behaviour and activities can become valuable targetable information for advertisers. Advertisers will be able to target users who have shared through their applications and even reach users who have not Liked or visited their Facebook page. That’s powerful stuff and starts to provide more granular information to better target advertisements and tie them to ever more specific activities.
There was another intriguing piece of news. Zuckerberg believes Facebook will remain a social environment. While he expects natural social applications – e.g. communications, games – to proliferate, and new types of social applications around content like music, he does not see social applications in areas like healthcare or finance arriving for a long time.
If users want a single point of interaction with the web, Facebook has taken a major step forward with these changes. Whether there will be a privacy backlash from users who do no want so much of their lives automatically streamed and targeted is another matter. Yes, you can chose not to use the new features and remove data points, but when everything is designed to be automatic and seamless, how often will users forget.
