Facebook f8

First things first, let's look at the numbers. We all know Facebook is big, but at F8 it was announced that Facebook has now passed the 400 million mark worldwide and the number of people joining Facebook is speeding up rather than slowing down. To put this into perspective, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world, and here in the UK, somewhere between one person and a dismembered leg (1.35) out of every three people are on Facebook.

The numbers themselves are important since the announcements at F8 mean that the way we all use the web will change forever (again). Just to be clear, I'll put that bit in again: Post F8, the way we all use the web will change forever; because, dear lucky browsers, Facebook just made it personal (cue action music).

The three things announced at F8 that are getting us all het up are:

• Open Graph Protocol
• Authentication and Profiling
• Social Plugins

If you follow web development, you are going to hear so much more about these that it will bore you to tears, so here's our contribution to that boredom...

Open graph protocol

People have been able to share links on Facebook for a long time, but outside of an address, those pages were of little interest. The Open Graph protocol builds on the work of RDFa, Dublin Core classification and ontological frameworks to provide a semantic structure that the Facebook engine itself understands.

So what? So everything! Quite possibly the most visited website in the world can start to make real time recommendations based on what you are doing, planning to do or maybe haven't even thought about doing yet, but may be interested based upon your profile, your friends and compatible resources around the web that adopt this protocol. Computers are stupid, we all know that; through semantics computers can start to understand resources around the web, which allows them to be "Not so stupid" ™, and a lot of very clever people, Tim Berners-Lee included, have been pushing for this to happen for a very long time. At F8, Facebook made this a reality, not through being smart, but by making financially prudent for companies to spend money getting this done (and yes, Colony supports these out of the box).

Authentication and proofing

This is a technical one on which I could delve into vast amounts of detail, but I'll try to keep it brief. In short, Facebook has, to a large part, removed the barriers of profile retention and allowed third party companies access to your information (if you say yes, that is). Now all of that information that you've spent hours typing into their site becomes mine, mine, all mine <evil cackle>muhahaha</evil cackle>. Well not just mine, but mine and anyone else you give access to, which means that I can start doing some really funky stuff, not just on my site, or on Facebook, but even when you're not browsing. So, my sites' information network is now joined (again, if you let me), to your social graph / network in a seamless fashion that allows me to personalise your experience and give you what you want. Like I said before, now it's personal.

Social plugins

Facebook has made it easy. About 2 hours after the keynote, the social plugins page was opened up on their developer network, after about 2 hours and 10 minutes, the first of their social plugins was sitting on the Red Ant website. I am sure that social plugins will make it to a development blog later, but boy have they made it easy.

So now I'm sounding like a complete Facebook fan (will that become a Facebook like?!), which isn't 100% true, but also isn't 100% false. What is 100% are the numbers; and it is the numbers that will push these very funky features along. So to recap:

• F8 pushed the semantic web from being a pipedream to a reality
• F8 allowed the web to become personal for Facebook users
• I'm going to start using the new features because they improve the experience for my customers and therefore makes money for my customers
• And best of all, it's really, really simple to do

Like I said, remember the date and let's see how far along the road we are at the next F8.

This blog post was written by Richard Conyard

If you would like to discuss this post why not follow us on twitter?