Facebook f8 Live Unleashes New Live Feeds
The much awaited f8 Facebook annual developers conference started at San Francisco yesterday amidst expectations of a host of new applications to be unveiled . Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg used the opportunity to turn a Facebook disadvantage (being a standalone networking site as opposed to the mighty Google) to his favor by proposing an innovative open graph policy.
Needless to say, Facebook has the support of Google adversaries like Microsoft, CNN, ESPN, Turner, CBS and Yahoo in the content sharing loop. Additionally, to facilitate networking, Facebook and Microsoft are launching a document creation and application sharing platform based on Office 2010 that can be accessed through Facebook and a 3rd party site.
In his keynote address, the 25 year old CEO of Facebook talked of integrating mobile and web based applications through Facebook by instant sharing of platforms, via the news feed. By increasingly sharing content with news, social networking, mobile texting and gaming sites, Facebook will give its users the opportunity to display 3rd party content of their liking through the use of “like” and "share" buttons,
By increasing personalized social interaction Facebook would further increase user engagement, which is already high at over 6 hours per person, versus 2 hours for Google, Yahoo and MSN. This is helped by Facebook conversations being accessible via mobile texting, one of the fastest growing user segments: its volume has increased by 112 % and was only surpassed by Ttwitter, with 349% growth.
Apart from ‘share’ and ‘like’ buttons on offer, there's the Facebook connect feature with auto login, which is likely to raise privacy concerns. Your actions on the network will be automatically logged on to FB and form part of your feed, which you may not want.
The F8, whose events can be accessed live on the net, may have other feature announcements coming, many of which are held back as last day surprises. One such feature is the Facebook location tool now under wraps, but expected to be released at the conference to compete with Twitter and Google. After all, it is not the data that is the key but its use that keeps the consumer engaged and brings in the advertisement moolah for FB. The location tool is an important piece in the jigsaw puzzle for social interaction.
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