Facebook held their own version of the G8 summit yesterday for developers, dubbed “f8”. This year they announced some spectacular changes to Facebook, from the way people will see your profile to the way that apps can use your information. Here’s the skinny:
Profile – Timeline:
This is the biggest change to the profile that Facebook has made in years. It’s completely ditching the old profile and going forward with whet they’ve dubbed the “timeline”. The timeline is actually a perfect name for this, as it will hold virtually every piece of information about that you’ve ever put on Facebook. Ever. Back to your birth. Here are some screenshots:
As you can see, everything is oriented chronologically, with years, months, and days. It goes down to the minute. It’s also very aesthetically pleasing and easy on the eyes. Another note is the cover photo, this is selected by the user and makes the entire page start off feeling like a blog. You can now have a lot more control over what people think first thing when they see your page.
Keep in mind that you can add, delete, or change almost anything on your timeline.
How to get the timeline profile now.
“Liking” is now ________ any _________.
Use your imagination.
_________ is reading the Old Town Media Blog.
_________ is watching Star Wars.
_________ is
Well, you get it. Companies can now enable you to be able to (verb) any (noun). This is one that will likely take a little bit to catch on, which may be a good thing as it will likely lead to an explosion of unnecessary sharing.
The Ticker
There is now a ticker that follows you on the right hand side of the window that has all of the “petty” information coming in in real time. You’ll still get status updates, important photos, or important information, etc. as they come in, but everything else will show up in the ticker.
Watching movies, reading books, reading the news, and soon much, much more.
Not only will you do these things, but you will be doing it in Facebook. Using their new “Open Graph” users will be able to listen to, say Mumford and Sons in Spotify while reading Yahoo News and watching Psych on Netflix. All within Facebook.
We foresee virtually every entertainment and service company joining in on this trend to make all of their data available through Facebook. This means that you could do your banking, blog, and do word processing while keeping up with friends’ updates on the ticker from one website.
Lifetime permissions
Facebook apps now have lifetime permissions. Facebook has allowed many of their apps to take lifetime permissions if you give so you don’t have to keep re-approving them.
We’re sure we’re going to see many, many iterations of these changes and even further adjustments, but for now we’re just excited to see what people are able to do with these ones.