Facebook prepares to take over the world as new features announced

[editor]

Bit more analysis here. 'Scuse the c&p but there's a lot to cover (and there's loads more on the page)

What has Facebook announced?

Essentially, there's three or four main areas, depending upon how you look at it, as well as a bit of a bonus which wasn't so much unveiled as just laid down as a little tester. They are as follows:

1) Social Plug-ins
This is probably the easiest part to get a handle on. What Facebook is doing is offering a bunch of social plug-ins as a way of other websites to embed widgets on their own pages with direct and often live access to what's going on in Facebook in relation to the site that you happen to be looking at.

If you go to CNN's homepage, you can see an example of this right now. Look to the right of the screen and you'll see the Friends' Activity plug-in which can direct you to other CNN pages which one of your friends on Facebook may have shared on their Facebook profiles. It's a clever way of making the content of another website more appropriate to each individual viewer.

Another of the plug-ins can be seen on IMDb where all the pages have a Like widget, just the same as the ones you would see on Facebook itself next to friends' comments and updates and such. If you Like another page, it'll work in much the same manner with that page then appearing as a link on your profile.

Essentially, the Like feature of Facebook suddenly becomes a powerful Digg-like tool - a recommendation engine for other websites.
That said, there is a separate Recommendations plug-in to be added as well. This will appear in rather the same way as the Activity Stream but will be regardless of what your friends have shared. Instead, it will suggest relevant content based on the site you're looking at. Whether those links will take you to other sites or not has not been stated.

The Log in plug-in (yeah, a mouthful, that one) is essentially a re-branding of the Facebook Connect scheme which merges your membership of sites with your Facebook profile as well. You'll be able to hit the Log in widget on another site which will then give you information from your Facebook network as well such as all your other friends that are also registered for this site.

The final plug-in is the Social Bar which will show your friends who are also on the same external site as well as allow you to chat and show the Likes within your network for the pages that you're on.

2) The Open Graph

Slightly mind-bending, this one. So, the best thing to do is not think about it too hard. The Open Graph is a social platform that Facebook is intending to turn into a more intelligent way of searching the internet. At the heart of it is the idea of the semantic web which is all about offering an individually relevant set of search results based on the user doing the looking - all this rather than the traditional approach of chucking in a search term and getting the same results as anyone else would who happens to be using Google.

The latter method relies on how the search engine happens to have ranked and indexed all the pages, whereas the Open Graph intends to present pages based on you're more likely looking for or might want to see.
Facebook, of course, has a massive user base of 400 million people and how they relate to each other. The Open Graph platform is going to add to that all the relationships you have with objects as well, be they web pages, restaurants, music, films or whatever and all based on what you've shared and Liked and all the apps you use.

Through that, Facebook can work out an almost complete social map of your personality and how strong your feelings are towards each of these connections to offer a more relevant search for you. Very ambitious indeed.
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/32712/guide-to-facebook-f8-announcements

 

[editor]

Coincidentally I was just reading this about Facebook aggregating and displaying more personal data on a mandatory basis, including "current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests".

You can just make up shit though.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

You can just make up shit though.

You don't have to put in any of it at all. But if, say, you only want to reveal your city and the school you went to to people you choose - you can't any more. Apparently.

 

[dweller]

yep, facebook bastards have just removed all of the stuff I wrote in the "info" section that would normally be visible by just my friends,
instead I was offered links to connect my profile to various fb "pages" based on my info. If I chose any of these pages they would then be visible to
anyone visiting my profile. I declined. Now my whole long list of books I read and other adhoc bits of writing I liked having in my info section have been deleted by facebook.
Thanks you bastards!!!

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Here's another one: app developers are now allowed to store user data indefinitely.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_data_privacy_so_much_has_changed_in_two_y.php
Except that they're not allowed to use those data outside of your application even if the user consents. Because that might allow people to move their stuff out of Facebook to somewhere else.

Also there are reports on Twitter right now of Facebook blocking all bit.ly short links from Facebook pages as "offensive".

 

[FridgeMagnet]

And another one! Is it Facebook Privacy Day?
http://librarianbyday.net/2010/04/p...tant-personalization-yes-you-have-to-opt-out/

Allowing instant personalization will give you a richer experience as you browse the web. If you opt-out, you will have to manually activate these experiences. Please keep in mind that if you opt out, your friends may still share public Facebook information about you to personalize their experience on these partner sites unless you block the application.

another on the same subject: http://gigaom.com/2010/04/22/facebooks-instant-personalization-is-the-real-privacy-hairball/

 

[soulfulofsoul]

All it is, is just a streamlined version of cutting and pasting a url into a status update.

This is basically it, isn't it? So.. making it easier to link to something you like- making it possible in one click- is the big difference isn't it?

Will it link to a specific article or a website? eg would your facebook profile show you as liking 'life discovered on mars' (if that was an article) or simply 'new scientist'?

 

[Jonti]

Facebook is ... offering a bunch of social plug-ins as a way of other websites to embed widgets on their own pages with direct and often live access to what's going on in Facebook in relation to the site that you happen to be looking at.

Gosh! What a great boon to info-users everywhere, eh?!

I can just hear them wailing and gnashing their teeth at arstechnica.com and edge.org and slate.com, even at bbc.co.uk. Verily forsooth, how on earth did web-users ever manage to read those sites without knowing what facebookers thought of them?

"Gratitude" hardly seems a strong enough word to express one's feelings towards the blessed Facebook guys, for the gift of their revolutionary new widget ...

 

[Jonti]

Mr Zuckerberg has done more harm to the human race than anyone else his age ...

We're not going to win the "Freedom of the Internet" discussion against China, not with Facebook on our backs. Mr Zuckerberg richly deserves bankruptcy, so let's give it to him ...

Here's how:-

 

[FridgeMagnet]

The Facebook-To-English Translator has Facebook's definitions of some terms which you might have thought meant something else. e.g.:

Public information
This is the term Facebook uses to describe information that it wants to share with anybody and everybody. Knowing what information Facebook considers "public" at any given moment can be confusing, but it's key to understanding what information Facebook may share with its business partners without seeking further permission.

Any time "public information" is referenced now, Facebook is talking about your: name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, complete list of your friends, and your complete list of connections (formerly the list of pages that you were a "fan" of, but now including profile information like your hometown, education, work, activities, likes and interests, and, in some cases, your likes and recommendations from non-Facebook pages around the web).

There's also an interesting timeline of Facebook's changing privacy policies.

 

[editor]

Here's a timely article:

Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook
http://gizmodo.com/5530178/top-ten-reasons-you-should-quit-facebook

I was staying in a remote farmhouse in southern France for the last week with very limited web access.

Over the week, I accessed urban a few times, checked my mail and looked up some websites and found I didn't miss Facebook one tiny bit.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

I use it less and less for personal use and more and more for work. Found email has become popular again by people I knew who did everything via FB...

 

[FridgeMagnet]

All right, this is really taking the piss now.

Facebook's new features secretly add apps to your profile

If you visit certain sites while logged in to Facebook, an app for those sites will be quietly added to your Facebook profile. You don't have to have a Facebook window open, you don't need to be signed in to these sites for the apps to appear, there's no notification, and there doesn't appear to be an option to opt-out anywhere in Facebook's byzantine privacy settings.

I'm glad I've never really used the thing, now, as getting all the data I'd put into it out again would be effectively impossible at this stage.

 

[wemakeyousoundb]

All right, this is really taking the piss now.

Facebook's new features secretly add apps to your profile


I'm glad I've never really used the thing, now, as getting all the data I'd put into it out again would be effectively impossible at this stage.

what is the usual name for applications/software that install themselves with no notification again?