Following the announcements from the Facebook F8 conference, it seems we’ll need to brace ourselves for an onslaught of more changes to come.
On the menu is:
Like it or not, your profile will take on an entirely new form. Profiles will look more like an online scrapbook, featuring a timeline of your entire life from birth to the present day. Photos will be bigger and new interactive options will be available.
Now you can share your whole list with friends, family (and Facebook stalkers), from your birth to the present day, through Facebook Timeline.
The official site says,
“ Timeline is wider than your old profile, and it’s a lot more visual. The first thing you’ll notice is the giant photo right at the top. This is your cover, and it’s completely up to you which of your photos you put here.
As you scroll down past your cover, you’ll see your posts, photos and life events as they happened in time. You choose what’s featured on your timeline. You can star your favorites to double their size or hide things altogether.”
Mark Zuckerberg further explains that, “You have complete control over everything on your timeline. You have control of what’s there and you also control who can see everything.” Your recent posts will automatically be added to this page, and from this you then have the option to insert things from your life that are missing or remove other things.
Currently, it is available for developers, though Facebook plans to roll this out to all users in the next few weeks.
Gone are the days when all you could do was ‘Like’ a post, comment, photo etc. With the launch of Facebook Gestures, Facebook developers can turn any verb into a button. This means we’ll be seeing the addition of verbs to the nouns that a person can use to describe what they’re sharing. Zuckerberg explains, “Now you don’t have to like a book, you can just read a book..you don’t have to like a movie; you can just watch a movie.”
New Open Graphs
The New Open Graphs, as Mark Zuckerberg explains is, “making it so you can connect to anything you want” and lets you “express yourself in new ways.
Thanks to Facebook’s new Open Graph and new partnerships, friends can use these apps to do new things like listen to a song at the same time and help each other discover new music through Spotify. The same goes for watching tv on Hulu in Facebook and reading news with friends. Using Facebook’s new Ticker section, which displays real-time updates of what your friends are watching, listening to, playing, reading and so on, you can click on the activity to share experiences.
Even better the New Open Graphs allow Facebook to expand beyond game related apps into media (music, movies, TV etc) and lifestyle (exercise, food, travel etc).
So far it seems Facebook’s recent changes haven’t been well received. And with Facebook moving towards a more personal and transparent social site, their new “share-everything” mantra seems a little unsettling for those of us concerned with privacy issues. What are your thoughts on the changes?
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