Facebook announced a slew of new products at its f8 developer conference in San Francisco on Thursday, aiming to fully integrate users’ lives through a series of major media and lifestyle-centric application integrations with its social network.
“Millions and millions of people have spent years curating the stories of their lives, and there’s no way to share them,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
Until now.
Facebook’s vision of the future involves bringing its users entirely into its social platform, allowing for the Facebook page to be a sort of one-stop shop, scooping up all of your activities and displaying them in one grand, blue and white frame.
The grand plan begins visually. The new “Timeline” product is something of an overview of your past Facebook activity in an entirely different visual format. Timeline goes back into your history of status updates, the apps you’ve used and the places you’ve checked into. The information collected in your timeline is dependent on what sort of data about yourself you want collected over time. So in order to, say, begin collecting data about your music listening habits, adding an application to a user’s timeline is a simple, one-click process.
The other half of Facebook’s vision: Apps. Facebook’s new class of social applications include the media-centric — music, movies, news and books — as well as what the company calls “lifestyle apps.” Essentially, instead of just “liking” things, the new class of apps will allow you to “read, watch and listen” to the integrated media services. Lifestyle apps capture most everything else
Apps are the stuff of Timeline. Installing this new class of apps onto your timeline will curate and summarize the history of your life as seen through Facebook — a collection of your activities curated and seen on a single page.
“It’s a container big enough to hold your entire life,” said Facebook vice president of product Chris Cox.
Facebook has gradually made changes to integrate the site further and further into our daily lives. Last month, Facebook introduced its Messenger app, which aims to replace SMS text messages on smartphones and instead have users communicate via the Facebook messaging system. With today’s announcements, Facebook is reaching further into making itself a one-stop destination for a user’s daily life.
“The last five years of social networking have been about getting people signed up, and getting people connected with their lives,” said Mark Zuckerberg at the f8 keynote. “The next five years are going to be defined by the apps and depth of engagement,”
With Facebook’s push into music, the company has partnered with a host of music services, including Spotify, MOG and Rdio. Using any of the music services will show up in your friend activity feed. That means the title and artist of a given track you’re listening to will show up in a separate activity feed. If your friends see a song they’re interested in, they can click on your status and listen to the same song along with them. The feature is akin to the Turntable.fm app, an up-and-coming group listening service.
Of course, the music industry has been in turmoil over the past decade, and deeper integration between services like Spotify and Facebook’s massive user base of 800 million people could have serious repercussions with the big record labels. But Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is more optimistic.
“Spotify users who connect to Facebook listen to more music, a wider variety of music, and because they’re more engaged, they’re twice as likely to pay for music,” Ek said during the event keynote.
Apple, however — whose iTunes music catalog is host to an enormous treasure trove of music — was conspicuously absent from Facebook’s list of content partners.
“Its obviously our ambition to have every app be social,” said CTO Bret Taylor, when asked specifically about Apple’s lack of involvement at a press conference. “So you know, long term.”
Facebook doesn’t stop at music. The company also announced a tighter integration with Netflix (along with a larger number of other partners) providing all the viewing activity of Netflix customers to Facebook in order to show the movies and TV shows you’ve been watching.
“If Netflix has huge success in a social way,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said, other companies could potentially follow suit.
News organizations are also jumping on board, with major organizations like The Washington Post and Yahoo News introducing their own integrated Facebook apps, which allow users to read content from partner news sites entirely within Facebook itself.
And finally social games. With users able to see what sorts of games their friends are playing, games are more capable of spreading across the platform faster.
Facebook and Google have been in fierce competition for customer mindshare since Google debuted its own social network, Google+, in June. Both have sought to out-innovate the other, continually adding new products and features.
Last week, Google widely released a single Google+ API for the first time, allowing developers to integrate their outside apps with the social platform. API releases have been important to social startups trying to grow — like Twitter, FourSquare and others — But Google’s first step in outside is far behind that of Facebook. Through the maturation of Facebook Platform since its launch in 2007, the company has grown its developer base at a tremendous rate. Over two and a half million outside web sites and apps have already integrated with Facebook.
When Google+ first launched in June, the search giant seemed to have one-upped Facebook; Google introduced a group video chatting feature — dubbed “Hangouts” — allowing up to ten users at a time to speak with one another via web cam. It was one of Google+’s most popular features. Facebook debuted its in-browser Skype video chat client shortly thereafter, but it lacked the punch that Google’s Hangouts had.
But Facebook isn’t one to be outdone. Mobile app startup company Color — which initially debuted as a photo sharing app — re-imagined its app to work with Facebook as a real-time video and photo app that runs on smartphones, letting users stream video from their phone to their friends on Facebook.
“With its new Timeline and app changes that bring real time discovery of content and activities, Facebook is positioning itself as not just your social graph online, but your life online,” said Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran in a statement.
Facebook’s vision is still some ways off. Timeline launches in beta form today, available only to developers. User sign-ups are available through Facebook’s site, and the Timeline product will roll out widely to users over the next couple of weeks.
But it’s about more than just the layout. With deeper, fuller integration of the new class of social apps, Facebook is enriching its ecosystem through bolstering its already vibrant developer base. Developers can advertise their apps freely through user “reading, watching and listening,” actions that give fuller detail to the myriad products already integrated with Facebook.
Zuckerberg closed with his thoughts on Intel, a company he’s long admired. “They had Moore’s Law. They understood what kind of amazing new products would be possible, and more importantly what they would mean with society and the world.”
Today, the young CEO has similar aspirations. The so-called Zuckerberg’s Law postulates that people share twice as much information each year, and that information sharing will continue as the years go on.
With today’s major push into sharing myriad kinds of new products, Zuck’s Law may soon be in full effect.
