Today Facebook will be announcing a number of new products and services at the company’s f8 developer event. While there are numerous rumors and speculation about what will be announced, we’ll start to find out what’s being announced in the next few minutes as Mark Zuckerberg and Bret Taylor take the stage. If you want to see streaming video of the event you can do so here. We will be posting coverage on our site as well.

[10:04 Pacific] We’re waiting for the event to get started.

[10:05] David Kirkpatrick reports that Microsoft is making a big partnership announcement with Facebook. More to come.

[10:06] We’re told that Facebook will not be making a location announcement just as we wrote last night.

[10:09] The audience is being told the event is about to get started.

[10:11] Mark Zuckerberg is on the stage.

[10:12] Mark is explaining how last year Facebook launched Connect at last year’s event and today’s announcement will be the “most transformative thing we’ve done for the web”. The first will be the Open Graph. The Open Graph puts people at the center of the web and that people and things can be “semantically” related. The second theme will be using the open graph to make social and personal experiences everywhere you go. We’ve learned that the less friction there is, the more effective things are.

[10:13] Mark is mentioning that there are 400 million people on Facebook (no new statistics there). In the last year mobile usage has grown by 5X. There will be a few policy changes today. The first is a one step permissions dialog. Overall this should make building on the platform much easier.

[10:16] Previously we limited the caching data policy. Now developers can cache user data and the 24 hour caching policy has been eliminated. This will be interesting to see what policy advocates say about this.

[10:17] We also want to provide an update about Facebook Credits. Right now we have almost 100 applications in the program and we’re still in closed beta for the program. (I guess they aren’t opening this up today) They are focused on scaling this to the entire ecosystem.

[10:18] At our first f8 I discussed the concept of “the social graph”. Facebook is only mapping out a part of this graph (mostly people and relationships). Developers are mapping other parts of this graph. Yelp is mapping the part of the graph related to small businesses, and Pandora is mapping the part related to music. By pulling this data together we can make a web which is more “semantically aware”.

[10:19] Mark is now demonstrating the concept of the Open Graph. What we’re about to show you in a minute is how all of this is going to become a lot easier. If I write a review on Yelp, that data is not connected to my other services. One hack that developers have done to move around this is to post the data to the stream. Right now the stream is ephemeral and data eventually floats away over time. Other developers won’t be able to understand the semantic relationship between you and places and things.

[10:22] If you write a review saying something is positive, we can post information about stuff that you’ve liked anywhere on the web. We’ll also be able to show you things that your friends like. (Beginning to sound more like a semantic search engine). When we connect all these things together, the web is going to get a whole lot better.

[10:23] Today we’re going to announce a few key technologies. The first is a new version of our platform called the “Graph API”. This will be implemented on an open standard that we’ll later talk about. The other thing is a series of “social plugins” that you’ll be able to drop into your site without having to write a simple line of code. Mark is now demonstrating an example on CNN, where he sees friends that have liked a story. The user doesn’t need to log in to CNN ever as Facebook serves up content. If I “Like” the content, anybody implementing the Open Graph will be able to access this data.

[10:25] There will also be a stream which I can view that shows what content my friends have been liking. Mark is now inviting Bret Taylor on stage to demonstrate what they’ve done. Bret is now talking …

[10:26] Bret is talking about how they started Friendfeed. At Friendfeed, users needed to friend 5 people in order for them to become active. If the user never found at least 5 friends there was a good chance they wouldn’t return. We did what most social sites do: we added an address book import to make it easier to find friends.

[10:27] Late last year Facebook launched Connect and after implementing it in FriendFeed, we had Connect users who became 4 times as likely to log in.

[10:28] Today we are going to make three product announcements. The first is social plugins which provide “instant personalization”. You should be able to have a user that has never visited your site instantly have a social experience. The “Like” button is the most basic version of these social plugins. At this point, all you need to do is embed an iFrame and your site will be instantly enabled. You don’t even need to register your site within Facebook.

[10:30] Once you place these like buttons on your site, they power new services. One of them is an “activity stream plugin” which shows a user all of the activity their friends have had within their site. If you go to CNN today you’ll see this activity stream plugin. The other widget is a “Recommendations” plugin that will show a user content that is most relevant to a user visiting your site and all you need is a single line of code.

[10:32] A new “Login” plugin will show a login button but it will also show all of a visitor’s friends who are also registered for the site. The final plugin is the “social bar” which shows chat, likes, and friends who are on the site. It’s similar to the bar that’s already at the bottom of Facebook’s site. So where do likes go when they make their way back to Facebook.com? Up until now there has been reverse chronological data that show up in a user’s feed but unfortunately the only people that see that are people who visit a person’s profile in a few hours.

[10:34] The second product announcement we have today is the Open Graph protocol. Now there are various types of meta data (title, type, genre, and city) for music or other interests that a user has. We’ll now use this semantic knowledge to represent a user on Facebook.com. On IMDB, there is now a “Like” button on every page. When I “Like” a movie, it will now show up in the “movies” section of my profile. When a user visits my profile and mouses over that movie, they will see a link to that content on Facebook.com. This data will also show up in search results.

[10:36] Today we’re launching the Open Graph with 30 partners, spanning all categories. For example, I can connect to an athlete on ESPN.com. It’s pretty clear that Facebook is in a race to develop the most effective semantic search engine at this point in the presentation.

[10:37] For the first time, the interests in my profile link to sites off of Facebook.com. My identity isn’t defined by something on Facebook but instead by things around the web. We think the connections between people and the things they care about will help create a more connected web. Our third announcement for today is the Graph API, which is an attempt for us to realize our core API within this new graph structure. The primary design goal (via http://graph.facebook.com) is to make it accessible via a terminal and CURL. In the graph API, every user as an object representation and an ID.

[10:39] The connections between objects in the graph are represented equally elegantly. The URL will be http://graph.facebook.com/userID/likes, pages, events, groups, etc. It’s a much more elegant implementation of the API. The new graph API in not just a veneer. We are now launching many new features including a new version of Search. We’re also giving developers the ability to search over all public updates on Facebook. As a developer you’ll be able to build a module that tracks what people are saying about a specific brand.

[10:41] This stream will also be real-time. Now when I update my profile, that information will be updated directly in the API. We’re also using new authentication models, and today we’re announcing the implementation of OAuth 2.0. The first reason this is a big deal is that it’s an industry standard. The service is extremely simple. The implementation process takes 5 minutes. This will also work with all of new APIs as well as our existing APIs.

[10:43] To recap, today’s announcements are: the open graph, social plugins, and the graph API. Now Mark Zuckerberg is welcomed back to the stage.

[10:44] Mark is listing some of the partners to get ready: Flikster, Kiva, Slate, CNN, omgpop, Scribd, IMDb, Pandora, MyDeco, and many more. Today we believe we’ll serve 1 billion like buttons on the web. The web is at an important turning point. Most things aren’t social and don’t use your real identity. Recently this is really starting to change. Now with the Open Graph and social plugins, more sites will impelement more social feature without requiring users to login.

[10:45] Today I want to show you one more thing which is a little glimpse of the future. Today I want to show you one from Microsoft called Docs.com which is Microsoft’s version of their Office suite that lets you collaborate with your friends online. You will be able to view a document just from within a link on Facebook. Immediately you’ll be able to see the document, edit it , and share with your friends. It’s Microsoft online with basic Facebook integration. The service will be available later today at Docs.com.

[10:48] When you show up to Pandora now, you’ll be able to see which of your friends see similar music that your friends are interested in. It instantly makes it more social but you don’t need log in.

[10:49] That’s all we wanted to announce today! Thanks for coming. As a closing thought I’d like to tell a story. He’s talking about his girlfriend when the professor in medical school asks the attendees how many people had had a transformative experience that made them realizing that they need to help people. He did the same test in law school and nobody put their hands up. He then asked the law students if they had a memory of when they thought fairness was important and everybody’s hands went up. Essentially we all have a lot of early memories that the world can be a lot better and “I’m going to make it that way”.

All attendees of the f8 developer conference are receiving special RFID tags that enable them to check-in to various locations throughout the conference venue. The service lets you tag yourself in photos, become a fan of various Facebook Pages, and share activity to your Facebook profile. While it’s still a concept service, it’s interesting to see some of the things that Facebook developers are currently testing.

Facebook has been widely expected to make some type of location announcement today, yet there are no specific sessions dedicated to explaining how to implement location within Facebook. One can imagine that RFID would be extremely useful for enabling users to check in to various locations, however in its current form, there’s little disclosure on what each check in results in.

For example, there’s a “Facebook Web Development” booth that you can check into by tapping your RFID tag on a reader (pictured to the right). Once you check in, you become a fan, however there is no disclosure what will happen once you swipe your ID card. Thus the process is clearly an early stage test to provide some entertainment value for attendees of the f8 event. It’s definitely interesting though and it’s a sign that we may see other location announcements in the coming hours.

One other cool feature of the presence reader is that all check-ins are displayed on a large display within the main hall of the conference center. The result is that you can watch people as they walk around the venue in theory. While the actual presence tracking doesn’t appear to be functional (in terms of peoples’ exact location), the visualization adjusts as more people check in to various areas throughout the venue.

More f8 coverage to come!

Presence Visualization

Presence Profile Photo Story

Last night’s story from the Financial Times about a behavioral ad network being powered by Facebook’s new Like button turned out to be completely false and the article was quickly changed to reveal nothing new. However with all the discussion around Facebook’s new “Like” button and speculation about its implications, we’ve come to our own conclusions about what will make Facebook’s new “Like” button a huge deal and spark a second developer gold rush.

It’s Not The Same As “Sharing”

Facebook’s share button is a great service which enables website owners to attract viral distribution through Facebook by prompting users to share content. It’s a great system, however there is still a multi-click process, and as any developer who’s handled web optimization knows: one click is better than two. Right now Facebook has a service called share analytics which enables developers to track how many times an article has been shared. It’s a great tool, and while a number of developers have already integrated the service into their products, an ecosystem of aggregators has not proliferated.

The problem is that developers need to input individual URLs in order to find out how many times an article or website has been shared and that requires a pre-existing database of URLs. In essence, it’s too complicated to develop robust aggregation services built on top of the existing system.

Protecting Privacy While Providing More Data

In Facebook’s battle with Twitter, privacy has surprisingly proven to be a weakness for the company. Every step the company has taken to make more user data available to developers is met with a significant amount of backlash. In addition to all but forcing users to make more information available, Facebook has received criticism for recent privacy policy changes among other things. While the users don’t want to make their data publicly available, developers thrive off data. So to avoid the whole privacy issue all together, Facebook is preparing to introduce the “Like” button which enables users to vote for content they like.

Twitter’s Retweet Ecosystem

Twitter has given rise to a massive ecosystem of aggregators all of which are powered by a single action: retweeting. This action enables aggregators to determine what content is popular at the moment and combined with profile data among other things, can actually enable basic filtering features. Sites like Tweetmeme have surfaced to let people know “what’s hot” on Twitter at any given moment. There are now numerous analytics companies that also track retweet data to determine who network influencers are in addition to providing other interesting data sets.

The Public Stream Of “Liking”

With the massive amounts of data available to developers, Twitter has successfully built a large developer ecosystem. However depite Facebook’s integration of many Twitter-like features into their existing products, none have fended off the “Twitter threat”. So what would really do the trick? I believe that a public stream of “likes” from users will provide developers with a massive dataset to build any aggregator they’re interested in.

Not only that, but Facebook can provide anonymized user data at the same time. For example: you will be able to find out that an article about a new XBox game was shared primarily among male users aged 18-25. You may also be able to collect other interesting data points all collected from a user’s profile including geographic data, language, relationship status, education, and more. This would also provide a legitimate rationale behind Facebook’s recent privacy changes which will enable Facebook to share your data with other websites without you logging in to them.

The bottom line is that this new system could be massive and developers would flock in droves to build applications based on this new data set. Facebook’s expanded analytics package that could be released at this week’s f8 would also be able to provide instant insight into the type of users visiting a company’s site. Talk about priceless. Facebook will instantly spark a new advertising revolution in which previous requirements of cookie-tracking is completely unnecessary: website owners will instantly know their site traffic’s demographics.

The Like Revolution

While there will be other important features that empower developers and website owners, Facebook’s new announcements on Wednesday will most likely spark a second Facebook-powered gold rush. This time it will be built on the world’s largest anonymized data set. This system would also be in line with all the previous rumors we’ve heard about the public stream firehose, the new privacy policy, the google analytics competitor, and more. Combine this public stream with other rumored announcements for f8 and it appears as though this week’s developer event could be as big as the first f8 hosted three years ago.

Get ready for the battle of the social web titans to take place over the next week and half. Following a crazy weekend in which Twitter announced the acquisition of Tweetie, leaving many developers feeling betrayed, Facebook has a massive opportunity to steal the spotlight. With both companies holding their developer conferences in the next 10 days, here’s how Facebook is poised to steal developers’ attention.

Twitter Developers Feel Betrayed

Before jumping into Facebook’s strategy to out open Twitter, it’s important to frame the conversation in terms of what went down over the weekend. Twitter can credit their success over the past couple years to the thousands of developers who have helped build tools that make their service easier to consume and interact with. Whether that’s Seesmic (who now feels threatened) or Tweetie (who was acquired by Twitter on Friday), Twitter’s growth can be attributed to the developer ecosystem that has jumped at the opportunity to build on top of the Twitter API.

While the writing was on the wall, as Mike Arrington pointed out over the weekend there was a justifiable reason for developers to be angry. Anytime developers fall because the platforms change the rules of the game, developers make a big fuss and then move along with life.

Having platform changes that hurt the ecosystem is not exactly foreign to Facebook app developers. Take the following instances where developers were affected by arbitrary policy enforcement or changes to the Platform:

• Facebook Kills Audio App (July 2007)
• Facebook Redesigns Profiles, Kills Widgets (September 2008)
• The Facebook Platform Dies (October 2008)
• Facebook To Remove Most Communication Channels (October 2009)
• Facebook Kills Notifications, Traffic Drops (March 2010)

After years of dealing with Platform policy inconsistencies and changes that negatively affect applications (in the short-term at least), Facebook developers have thicker skin than Twitter developers who have essentially been given full access with very few restrictions. Now Twitter developers are beginning to realize that Platform owners are always a source of risk and tension, even on Twitter.

Facebook Is Ready To Seize The Moment

With Facebook developers now having years of battle wounds, things can only get better. To be fair, things aren’t that bad for Facebook app developers, but things could be better. With next week’s f8 fast approaching, Facebook is looking to reignite the enthusiasm that developers had when they first opened the Platform in 2007. So how will Facebook be able to do this?

The Opening Of Facebook Becomes A Reality

In March of 2009 David Recordon predicted that in 2010, Facebook will no longer be a walled garden. Within months Recordon became an employee of the company as Facebook and it’s definitely not a coincidence. By next week, Facebook’s walled garden will be eliminated. With launch of the Open Graph API, a more robust public stream firehose, new location services, and a more robust identity management platform through upgrades in Facebook Connect, Facebook will become the most open social aggregator on the web.

Twitter previously stole developers’ attention with access to much more public data, however Facebook will soon grant similar forms of access to Platform developers. If I were to speculate about additional services, I’d expect the company to announce an upgrade to their temporarily disabled Data Store API, powered by the company’s new data centers.

The company has announced ambitious plans in the past, however I think this year Facebook will make some of the biggest bets they’ve ever made. With more cash to play with, Facebook should be taking bigger risks if they are going to surpass Google as the leading internet company. In addition to launching a new Credits system and a more robust Ads API to monetize things, Facebook is going to open up access to much more information.

While we’ll have to wait until next week to find out more about Facebook’s plans for world domination, know this: Facebook’s biggest asset is the company’s massive developer ecosystem and they are dedicated to making that ecosystem an exciting place to operate. With Twitter stealing some of the company’s thunder over the past couple years (so much that the company has integrated many of Twitter’s features into their site), Facebook is prepared to come out with guns blazing when f8 arrives next week.

Now that Twitter developers have a bad taste in their mouth, Facebook could provide just enough excitement to attract some of those developers back to the Facebook ecosystem. While Twitter will have some big announcements of their own this week, most of those announcements will be about a continued move toward Facebook-like functionality, reminding developers who the real king of the social web currently is.

More details are emerging about Facebook’s plans to develop a Like button for the entire web, and part of that involves moving away from “Become A Fan” for Facebook Pages to “Like”. This message was sent to advertisers via a confidential document (which was subsequently leaked to multiple outlets) and highlights initial rumors of a “Like” button for the entire web.

The pieces are all beginning to come together and as was the case two years ago, it appears that much of the information which will be announced at f8 is leaking out before the event. This new “Like” button will also be part of Facebook’s broader Open Graph API that will extend much of the Facebook Pages functionality anywhere on the web.

Facebook also intends to allow developers to apply the “Like” button to practically any structured object on the internet, if initial rumors are accurate. One of the major drivers of the verb changes is that “Like” performs much better than “Become A Fan”. The other is that developers will be much more likely to implement “Like” within their applications as it’s easier to integrate into other applications and websites.

Facebook told advertisers the following:

As part of a larger effort to improve user experience, increase engagement and promote consistency across Facebook, users will soon be able to connect with your Page by clicking “Like” rather than “Become a Fan.”

“Like” offers a light-weight, consistent way for users to connect with the things they are passionate about. This lighter-weight action for connecting to a Page on Facebook means that users will be making more connections across the site, including your Facebook Page.

The core functionality of Pages remains unchanged. For instance, your Page will still have distribution into News Feed. The purpose of this change is to maintain Pages’ powerful communication channels, while making it easier for users to connect with Pages.

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