Facebook F8: What's New? Open Graph, Data Policy Change, Docs.com

by Scott Wu | April 21, 2010 at 04:10 pm

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Facebook F8 Announcements: What's New?

Facebook's F8 Developer Conference was held in San Francisco on Wednesday April 21. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, had a few major announcements for developers. A few major announcements were made in the 2010 Facebook F8: the Open Graph, Facebook Connect update, cache data policy change. The anticipated Facebook Credits is still in beta testing stage.

Facebook user may have already noticed the "Become a Fan" icon has been change to a simple "Like" icon, but more changes are coming under the hood for developers using Facebook.

The Open Graph API is a major upcoming change to Facebook. The Open Graph Protocol allow better integration of data. In Facebook Director of Platform Product Bret Taylor's own words: it's "a specification for a set of metatags which you can use to mark up your pages to tell us what type of real-world object your page represents." One example is IMDB.com. When a user hits the "like" button on a IMDB movie page, the movie would be added to the list of "Favorite Movies" section on the user's Facebook profile.

Facebook Connect is getting an update to combine the permission granting process that users have to go through when using third-party applications. The update will make the process easier for users.

The cache data policy change would allow developers to adopt simpler program designs. The old policy dictates that no data could be stored for more than 24 hours.

Facebook Credits is currently in beta testing with more than 100 apps, and will eventually roll out for the Facebook network. The anticipated new feature would enable users to buy virtual goods with a single currency. Users would only need to enter their credit card or banking information once during setup. The service is expected to come with a 30% fee that goes to Facebook, like the model adopted by Apple's App Store.

Facebook also announced the partnership with Microsoft, with the document sharing product Docs.com. It allows users to edit or share documents online. The Docs.com website is still in beta. Lili Cheng from Mircosoft invited people to join the wait list for upcoming features.

"Once you put these 'like' buttons all around your site, the like buttons power a whole suite of social plugins," said Taylor, who joined Facebook when it acquired FriendFeed. An "activity streams" plugin will show all activities from the Facebook user's friend list on that third-party site. A "recommendations" plugin will provide suggested content to users. "It's not just 10 most e-mailed articles, this is truly powerful recommendations," Taylor said.