Facebook developer garage

So, when we received a Facebook notification that CEO, Mark Zuckerberg was making a rare UK appearance for the first time since these revolutionary announcements, we had to be in on the action. I felt like Charlie clutching my golden ticket as I rocked up to the Facebook ‘special edition’ developer garage event. As everyone settled with their iphones, ipads, macbooks and notepaper in laps, Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage.

Following the paparazzi flashes, he started off by talking about change and the fact that we are only really ‘at the beginning’ of this social revolution. Perhaps addressing the recent backlash after F8 concerning how Facebook handles privacy, Zuckerberg said we will all ‘look back in a few years from now when the web is more personalised and wonder why it wasn’t always that way’. It seems Red Ant are now among 300,000 sites which have the social plug ins and the web is truly on its way to becoming personal, whether we like it or not.

People products

Facebook is successful because it is about the people, they are the ‘reason for its existence and they always will be’. Pointing to internal heat map studies to support this, Facebook highlighted that their users ‘navigate by faces’, they are also more likely to convert on Facebook connect if they see their friends faces there too. Zuckerberg stated in order for the social web to change it needs to go back to its roots and the basics of ‘building products around people’. This is why all the social integration announced at F8 offers social context, showing you which of your friends likes the same movie as you on imdb or which of your friends has also logged into a website; it’s a form of recommendation.

Facebook were keen to showcase new products coming out which illustrate the potential for designing products around people. The new ‘fundamentally social’ version of Spotify, Spotify Open, connects with Facebook to bring in your friends playlists, meaning you can discover their music, send and receive a whole playlist and listen to your network feed. Social gaming was used as another example of an inherently social activity which can be leveraged through Facebook. Zynga and Playfish have been pioneers on the platform, bringing gaming, competitive spirit back to its roots by encouraging interaction with friends.

European pledge

Throughout the day, there were a number of mentions of the fact they plan to strengthen the focus on the European market, and pledged that this event and appointing Joanna Shields to lead the European business is just the beginning of building a stronger relationship with developers outside the US.

This increase in importance has apparently stemmed from the fact that nearly 50% of likes from the new 'like' button have come from Europe. They also noted the importance of the developer community, out of the 300,000 implementations of the social plugins since F8, a disproportionate amount came from ‘start ups’.

On top of this they release new European statistics, reporting Facebook now have:

• 26 million monthly active users in the UK
• 16 million in Italy
• 15 million in France
• 10 million in Germany and Spain

Watch this space

Zuckerberg and the team also touched on a few things they have in the pipeline:

• Credits

  Facebook are working with selected partners to create an effective developer monetisation idea. This is in Beta testing currently as they are working on the fraud and risk model but will eventually be open to all. Moving into the payment space was discussed and it was mentioned that social context provides an extremely low barrier to entry through the trust created; if your friends face is there at the checkout it would surely act as a great recommendation.

• Geolocation

  Not much was mentioned on this one. It was an audience question and the response was that of an MP at question time ‘we are finishing designing our application soon and hope to offer it soon’, so some form or geo location application is on its way to Facebook...at some point soon!

This blog post was written by Gemma

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