I attended Facebook's f8 developer conference yesterday virtually, tuning into the morning keynote sessions via Facebook video. I saved $500, and besides that, I had already brought my lunch.
Facebook's announcements at f8 yesterday come on the heels of a number of other changes, and they should be considered together to form a bigger picture of where they are and where they're going.
Recent Changes
Facebook has rolled out six changes of note in the past few weeks.
The News Feed
Your News Feed is the page that you go to when you log into Facebook, and for many people, it is the primary page of their account that they spend their time on. I still run into people who don't know the difference between their News Feed and their Wall. The News Feed is where you see all the updates and activities from your Friends and from all the Pages of those you have "liked" in the past. There used to be two lists of updates: "Top News" and "Recent News", and you clicked on a link to switch between the two. "Top News" offered you updates using Facebook's special-sauce algorithms that chose what they thought you'd be interested in. "Recent News" was all the news from your Friends and Pages, in reverse chronological order. (I use "Friends" vs "friends" when talking about Facebook Friends, because, hey, they may not really be your friends!) Facebook has now created one feed with "Top Stories" on top and "Recent Stories" underneath that. "Recent Stories" is not a comprehensive list of everything your friends have done, but includes most of their updates and posts.
The Ticker
On the right side of Facebook is a new feature called the Ticker, which is a realtime stream of things your Friends are doing relative to other people and content on Facebook and (increasingly) off of Facebook, as you make comments on other people's posts, listen to music etc. Yes, many of these things will be in "Recent Stories", and it is interesting to compare. But his is meant to be a fast realtime updating feed, and you can click on anything there to take a look at the underlying actions. This is meant to counter Twitter, whose primary page is something like (but less than) this.
Subscribing
Your News Feed used to be based on updates of people who are your Friends or Pages you liked. In an effort to be more like Twitter or Google+, Facebook now allows you to "Subscribe" to other peoples' public updates. There is a lot of fine tuning you can do about what kinds of feeds, but it allows you to keep up with more and other interesting people. This is important for people who had to create their personal pages and their "personal brand" pages. They can now publish as individuals and have wider connections. Note that this may make your News Feed even more crowded, but the next change is meant to address that.
Patterns
This is a big thing, and with some of the new announcements, I see it getting even bigger. In order to help with a glut of feeds, Facebook attempts to find patterns in updates, links, or activities of the people and pages you're connected to. That way, if 6 of your friends comment about the iPhone 5, Facebook will aggregate their posts and present them together: "Six of your friends commented on the iPhone."
Lists
Google+ Circles made it easy to group your connections meaningfully. Facebook always had this feature, but it was mostly out of sight and difficult to use. Their new list manager makes it easier, and more powerful with automatic list suggestions.
Status update
When you logged into Facebook, one of the first things you saw at the top of the page was an input box asking what you were doing. Updating your status was the first key piece of user-contributed content that gave value in the first place. Now it's gone. You still have a link called "Update Status" to open the input field, but it isn't nearly as inviting. Why not? Was there a discussion at Facebook HQ? "How can we get people to post fewer updates?" "I know - we can remove the input box at the top of the page."
Lots of value added in these changes, but rolled out in a clumsy way. Did Facebook expect the backlash? I saw mostly complaining about the changes with people really becoming livid. Maybe it was getting these changes out of the way before moving on to the big ones.
New Changes Announced at f8
The Timeline
The first big change announced at f8 was the new Wall/Profile page, called the "Timeline". If you got beyond the News Feed page and looked at your profile page, it was a mix of information about you (profile), all the things that you posted (on your Wall), and all the things that other people posted specifically to your Wall. After looking at the first page of your wall it said "Older Posts." People seldom move past that first page and look farther back in time. With the Timeline you can now see your entire life from now back to the year of your birth. Most of the years are not filled in, though it does not things from your profile such as graduation years. You can add photos to those, but in general, I don't seem to be able to add a photo I've already added to an album and reassign it to a year.
The design of the timeline is simple and striking, with a large area for a photo that seems to be begging for one of the panoramas I've stitched together using Adobe Photoshop Elements. After complaints about minor cosmetic changes to the Facebook interface, this one may be good enough and radical enough and add enough functionality to quiet the critics. Maybe.
The Timeline will change how you consider Facebook, and the division between your News Feed page and your Profile/Wall page. I think you'll start to spend more time on your own Timeline relative to what you spent on your own Wall.
I'm still looking for a way to search the timeline but I can't. Search me.
The Open Graph and Apps
Beyond the new interface, the big news relates to the Open Graph platform. This is the application interface to underlying social graph data that allows not only for applications within Facebook, but integration of external sites and applications into Facebook. It's one thing to "Like" something or share content on the Web with your Facebook Friends. The new features of Open Graph allow developers to offer more than "Like" or "Recommend". Developers can now create a whole vocabulary of verbs and objects to share with your Facebook graph. Not just "like" a book, but "read" a book (even those you didn't like!). This is a big step toward grabbing the potential of the semantic web and serving it up to a ready audience.
Along with the expansion of "Like" into a generalizable set of what Facebook calls "gestures", was an articulation of what I can best describe as design goals/aspirations/characteristics:
Frictionless access for apps
This could be as bad as it is big. As a Facebook user, as you install a new app you will be giving permission for that app to have full integration. You won't be asked time and again if you want your activity posted to Facebook. It will be posted. This makes the integrated experience much more seamless and automatic, but are people ready for it? I'm not so sure. Will I really opt-in to apps that announce and memorialize every time I change the channel? Read an article? Put on my shoes and walk around the block? It was eerie watching the Facebook and the app marketers at f8 so enthusiastically project how great this will be for everyone, but I don't know if that's going to be the norm. I may be wrong here; I've been wrong before. But this will be an area for great potential pushback on this.
Serendipity
Serendipity is already there in Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc., in that they are great platforms for discovering new things based on what others are doing and sharing. What Facebook did is reinforce explicitly how much of a value this is, and will continue to develop features that enhance serendipity. Good.
Patterns
As I said before, this is big. Not just collecting similar posts into patterns, but starting to share data analysis. "28 of your friends commented on the new iPhone 5, and those that own Androids were surprisingly positive." Think about it.
Etc.
Facebook also introduced GraphRank, perhaps a successor to EdgeRank, which is its special sauce for determining what may be interesting to you. This is a continued assertion of greater significance than Google's PageRank. If Google owns the de facto index of all the pages on the Web and can calculate their relevance, Facebook asserts ownership of the semantic graph of the web, and how you, your Friends, your connections, your activities, and all that content connect.
What wasn't there?
f8's announcements were all related to Facebook users, including interacting with each other and with well-integrated apps brought to you by specific companies and services. But the 800 million people whose online lives are shared and transformed by all of this are not Facebook's customers. They are Facebook's product. Facebook's customers were missing on Wednesday - companies (or "brands" as my colleague Gary likes to call them) who advertise on Facebook. Brands also participate in Facebook as content creators (part of the product), but even in that role, they were not that evident in the new features. There were no timelines of the local gym or the national fast food brand. It looks like Facebook's announcements are a way of reassuring advertisers (Facebook's true customers) that we, the product, has been enhanced and product supply is not in danger.
Unit 6,708,174 signing off!
It seems simple to me: Facebook rolls out some interface changes before their f8 conference. Users always complain about interface changes, and they do. Then at f8, Facebook announces some additional changes that aren't yet rolled out, but will be soon. Compared to the first set, though, these are really game changers. But Facebook can calculate based on past behavior that:
)
, it is a public post and your like/comment will be public. If it is an icon of two people 
, your like/comment will be among friends of the person doing the original post. A gear 
means they have it on a custom setting. I haven't seen those in the wild yet, so not sure if you can see what they have it custom-set to. Probably not. The point remains that even when Facebook gives you finer tuned privacy control, they are not so usable or well-documented.
(With the Timeline's View Activity feature, you'll be able to see and set the privacy for everything you do, but as of today, I'm not seeing all my "Likes" show up on my Facebook log. The Timeline hasn't rolled out yet, so I'm assuming they'll fix that before general launch. Right? And the Timeline still doesn't have a search feature so you cannot easily find your past lapses in judgement.)
