The floors of Facebook f8 in SF

I am at Facebook's f8 event, and just sat in on Mark Zuckerberg and Brent Taylor's keynote presentations, here's my recap.

Facebook by the numbers

There are now 400mln Facebook users, compared to last year's f8 event there were 100m. It took facebook 5 years to reach 100mln users, it took facebook mobile 3 years to reach 100mln users, and it has taken facebook connect 15 months to reach 100mln users.

New tech

Facebook wants to greatly simplify their API and third party development. There are several changes coming down to let them do this. Some are more major than others. I will go into each of these one at a time.

• Simplified permissions dialog

• Removing the 24 hour data storage restriction

• Credits

• Open Graph

• Graph API

• Social Plugins

• Search

• Real Time updates / Push notifications

• OAuth 2.0

Simplified permissions dialog

Currently to get user permissions to pull multiple different fields of data you need to make multiple calls to the facbeook API permissions calls to pop up multiple different dialogs to let the user grant your app permission to pull your profile information. They are simplifying this so that you can now make a single call to show the user a permissions dialog that contains a list of all the required permissions that your app is requesting at once. E.g. "This app requires permission to post to your wall, and also to see your photos".

Removing the 24 hour data storage restriction

Currently you are only allowed to retain a facebook user's data for 24 hours, facebook is removing this restriction, you can now store a user's data (indefinitely?).

Credits

Facebook already has this, I don't really know what's new about it. Basically credits is like a unified currency to spend on facebook. Just like XBOX live points / Wii points, etc. You purchase the credits in your local currency and can spend them in unified numbers within facebook.

Open Graph

Facebook users make connections within facebook already, between people, friends. What open graph allows is for facebook to make much deeper connections between user profiles than before. For example, if you and your friends all like the same movie, that's a connection point on the open graph. If several of your friends like a particular restaurant, that's a connection point on the open graph. Same with music, news articles. Pandora, and imdb will for example support the new open graph features. Basically you tag data with meta information e.g.

<meta property="og:title" content="green day" />
<meta property="og:type" content="band" />
<meta property="og:genre" content="punk" />

and Facebook uses this information to make the connections between users.

Graph API

Facebook has apparently reachitected much of their codes to be able to bring a much more simple and elegant way to find these Open Graph connections. You will not need facebook API or connect to use these new features. Although the new OAuth integration does seem required for retrieving any meaningful information.

It's a simple HTTP request, you can use your browser or cURL.

Hitting http://graph.facebook.com/[objectName] where objectName is a uid, page_id or alias will return you a JSON string containing some metadata for the object.

Hitting http://graph.facebook.com/[objectName]/[groups|events|likes|...] will give you a JSON string of more specific graph connections for the object / user. They happened to forget to mention that those more specific calls will require OAuth authentication. Which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned, at least there's some kind of protection of your personal data.

Social Plugins

They are going to start offering very simple plugins that are basically one line HTML IFRAME tags that will seemlessly integrate with your website. The IFRAME content is hosted by Facebook and therefor there is no Facebook connect required anymore, their server handles authentications, since the Facebook cookie can be read within the IFRAME. You instantly see relevant information on the page you're one.

One of the examples was to add a FB 'Like' button to a page, all you would do is add something like, this would presumably also automatically give you the "You, Someone and 3 other friends like this page" content which was in the screen shot, although they didn't specify that:

<iframe src="facebook.com/plugins/like" /> (tag not correct)

Similar plugins like an activity feed with a mini wall, a recommendations plugin, with similar data posted by your facebook friends, and the socialbar plugin, which is basically the toolbar facebook had, with all your friends, facebook chat, and whatnot automatically docked to the bottom of your external website.

Search

They made a small mention of significant improvements in search, but weren't extremenly clear about it. It sounds like they want to compete with twitter's hash tags and what not here, saying they can now search any kind of stream / feed / content.

Real Time updates / Push notifications

Instead of having to pull from the facebook servers repeatedly they will now let you register a callback URL that will notify your application automatically of any updates to the content / stream you are interested in.

OAuth 2.0

Facebook now follows the likes of Twitter, Google, etc in offering OAuth authentication instead of their facebook connect and API authentications. All of the existing Facebook API calls will live on happily along side the new OAuth.

Zuckerberg wraps up

Zuckerberg added a few more tidbits of information at the end of the keynote. They mentioned that CNN, Pandora, IMDB and whatnot will have the new Social Plugin integrations with the native facebook like buttons and whatnot starting today. He said he's expecting 1 bln click on these in the first day, which is insane. He called it his own personal McDonalds moment.

He adds that some products will be considered trusted apps and users won't have to facebook connect for those apps to grab (a certain subset?) of user data. Sounds like pandora is one of these trusted apps, so is Microsoft's new docs.com.