SAN FRANCISCO — Earlier this year, Daniel Ek, the CEO of the music service Spotify, was in a car with Mark Zuckerberg. Ek was visiting the Facebook founder in California while the two companies were working together on what eventually would be part of the massive announcement made by Zuckerberg today at his company’s F8 developer’s conference. It’s an initiative that will unleash new waves of applications on Facebook that will greatly enhance the power of the service — already a major part of people’s lives — by adding a limitless stream of lifestyle data that people can use to share and, ultimately, define themselves with a profile built on a stunning amount of personal information.
It’s all about the Open Graph, Mark Zuckerberg says on a stroll around the company’s Palo Alto headquarters.
The Swedish-based Ek doesn’t like to drive in the United States, so they were getting dinner provisions in Zuckerberg’s car. Ek’s mobile phone rang. The call was from American Express. Its representative told Ek it had detected bogus charges on his account and had cut off his card. It had already issued him another one. Ek asked how they knew this, and he was told that the charges were made in Florida. By examining Ek’s recent card activity — data which provides a personal, even intimate view of a person’s life — American Express had seen his flight to California, and felt confident to make the move.
Ek told his friend what happened. “Cool,” said Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg’s reaction to Ek’s little story comes as no surprise to anyone who has followed Facebook. Some people worry about negative consequences from all the information stored on them in places like credit card registries; others look for the benefits that come when others can use that information to help them. Zuckerberg is the spiritual leader of the latter camp. The company has always been straightforward in its mission to encourage people to share information.
Facebook believes that when people share within its system, without fretting about the data they generate, his company can deliver tangible benefits. (Just as American Express made productive use of Ek’s information.) People will become closer with each other, be able to express themselves, and generally participate in a community of friends and contacts more deeply and fruitfully than they could hope to do so in the physical world. It is an idealistic vision, but self-interest is involved as well. Facebook stores all the data that people share with their buddies, family, business associates and people they sat next to on an airplane once and impulsively friended. And it can use that to allow advertisers to micro-target their sales pitches.
Over the company’s brief history — it has taken only seven years to weave itself into the fabric of life for 800 million people — Facebook has added features that entice its users to share more. Sometimes it encounters objections and in a couple cases, Facebook has made strategic retreats, but generally its users wind up embracing the changes. Mark Zuckerberg’s instinct that people like to share seems sound.
But Thursday at its huge F8 developer’s conference Facebook is taking what might be its biggest step yet in fulfilling the vision. It annouced the culmination of “The Open Graph,” an initiative that will allow thousands of developers to make social applications tightly woven into the Facebook system, much more so than with the existing platform. Media applications in categories like music, news, and video will not only be able to instantly make their content more valuable as friends share what they’re reading, watching and listening to with each other, but the media itself will seem to be part of Facebook. Though media apps are prominent among the F8 launch partners, however, Facebook expects people to write programs that involve every imaginable aspect of life.
In other words, Facebook will be its own not-so-little internet, one on which people do the same things they have always done, but in a social way and, of course, on Facebook. What’s more, all those activities people perform with these apps — listening to a Bjork tune, reading about same-sex marriage laws, cooking Arroz con Pollo, running four miles, donating to Amnesty International — will be stored permanently and made accessible (if the user allows it) on a greatly enhanced profile page that will essentially become a remote-control autobiography.
Combined with other Facebook recent announcements — “friend lists” that help you classify your contacts into groups, a Ticker that gives updates from your cohorts as they happen, and changes in the newsfeed to make it more reflective of what your close friends are doing — Facebook is not so subtly doubling down on its ambitions to enable people to shed the pre-digital cloak of isolation and treat their life as a 24/7 reality show, broadcast to those in their social spheres.
A few weeks ago, Zuckerberg explained the Open Graph to me in a private walk around Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters (he seems happiest when explaining himself while perambulating). When I ask for a taut definition of the term, he can’t produce one. Unpacking some of the jargon he used to get the idea across, I figure out it’s basically a term Facebook uses as shorthand for we’re going to integrate far more apps, much more deeply into Facebook, and they will less annoying than they were the first time around.
“The Open Graph came from the idea that there’s no way that Facebook is ever going to build all these services ourself,” Zuckerberg says. “So therefore we should enable an ecosystem of developers to build great experiences.” Apparently the first implementation of the idea was the “Like” button, which allows users not only on Facebook but on other websites to indicate approval of something by a mouse-twitch. In barely one year the button has become not just a valuable part of Facebook but a cultural icon, evoking over 3 billion clicks a day. “Our studies show that people are using the ‘Like’ button primarily as a form of self-expression,” says Carl Sjogreen, head of the product platform management team. “So we staring thinking about how we could make that experience much richer.”
What Facebook came up with is a double-barrelled plan. First is the generation of applications that made profound use of all of Facebook’s key features. The previous generation of Facebook apps had limited access to all of a user’s information, and focused much of their attention simply on getting people to sign up. People found their newsfeeds stuffed with notices that friends had joined this or that application. It got as bad as spam. The apps themselves were consigned to boxes on the screen, not fully integrated into all of Facebook. “This was all we could do,” says former platform head of Facebook Dave Morin. “We had 20 million users then and 150 people working at Facebook.”
The previous generation of Facebook apps focused much of their attention simply on getting people to sign up. Newsfeeds were stuffed with notices that friends had joined this or that application. It got as bad as spam.
Worse, once users tried the apps, they were often unsatisfying. “The most successful things were games, and that’s not what Facebook had in mind,” says Joe Green, a former Facebooker who co-founded Causes, one of the few major apps in that class that didn’t flame out. “There are all these areas of human life that have not experienced the revolution of social,” he says. Now, he predicts, they will.
Facebook has plenty to offer those developers. So much so that even social networks that have tried to compete with Facebook in narrow ways have now decided to join up with the giant. “There are 35 million people on Facebook who have friend status with [the much smaller number of] friends who are signed up on our application — but many have not heard of us,” says Travis Katz, the CEO of Gogobot, a travel recommendation site. He expects that some of those millions will discover his site when Facebook reports that their friends have posted albums of their London trips, or tips on Chicago restaurants.
Bill Nguyen, the CEO of Color — a much touted social photo iPhone app that flopped on launch, reworked his entire business plan after getting briefed on the Open Graph. ”When we started our business, we saw ourselves as a Post-PC developer,” he says “Now we’re a Facebook developer.” He is hugely impressed at how Color’s new Facebook app can take advantage of all of the service’s features. (The app in question is a real-time video stream from people’s iPhones—it allows people connected on Facebook to participate in instant “visits” that lets them see the world from the camera of the friend’s iPhone.) “Today feels like the first day of the iPhone,” Nguyen says, anticipating a wave of social apps just as significant as the mobile apps that Apple’s phone unleashed.
The second part of the equation how Facebook itself is changing to accommodate the anticipated wave of new activity it will log through those applications. Even before F8, Facebook announced a series of new features or alterations in anticipation of today’s major news. Many of the familiar components of Facebook are going to be different, and new ones will be added. The Newsfeed will be now populated with a different mix of “stories” (Facebook’s term for those short items in the feed). “Lightweight” stories–Joe Blow friended Sally Smith–appear in a stream called The Ticker. Not so apparent yet is an alteration under the hood with smarter algorithms, called “Graph Rank,” that will allow new applications to flourish without spammng the newsfeed so you won’t get notified every time one of your close friends listens to a song or works out in the gym.
Friend Lists are also an important component. This is the application that a lot of people have noticed is similar to the Google+ Circles feature. A lot of people have noticed in the last week that Facebook has been aggressively requesting them to hone the list of their closest friends. This can be useful in the same sense that Circles is — helping them share personal items with only those they trust. But while Google sees Circles mainly as a filter that enables users to maintain privacy, Facebook is using its close friends list as a launching pad for new applications that let people share within a tighter social circle. “It’s perfect for us,” says Dave Morin, who’s now CEO of Path, a mobile social app built for sharing only among a small cohort. In another example, Causes will use the list to enable people to dun their closest friends for contributions to their favorite charities.
But the biggest shift, and what may be the most controversial, centers on the Facebook profile. It not only will look different — a large cover picture (users pick it) makes it look more like a stylish website than the bland resume of the original — but it serves a much deeper function.
Chris Cox, Facebook’s VO of Product
“With the current profile, you look at my wall, you look at my photos, you’re done — there’s nothing else to do,” says Chris Cox, Facebook’s VO of Product. He compares it to the first five minutes with a stranger, when you simply find out the basics about a person — where they work, where they went to school, who they know. Even the more extensive information that Facebook has added over the years only adds up to five more minutes of conversation, where you might learn what the person was been doing very recently.
Facebook can now serve some of most micro-targeted ads in history. Will users balk at all that information about them in the hands of a private company? Zuckerberg is used to that line of questioning, and clearly doesn’t think it’s interesting.
The new model is what Cox calls a “foundational narrative timeline.” In a sense, Facebook is letting you write your autobiography in real time. But no writing is involved — instead your work will be in curating the vast amounts of personal information generated by your activity in Facebook and all those social applications utilizing the Open Graph. What tunes were you listening to in March 2008? How much did you exercise? What was your trip to Mexico like? When did you start your relationship with Brenda?
On the Timeline, Facebook will gather and organize the massive amount of data generated by the apps you use to tell your story, minute by minute, day by day, year by years. And each application will have a tab that allows sanctioned visitors to burrow into your very specific actions in this specialty or that. The Spotify tab might allow you to check out which songs you’ve been obsessed with lately or whether or how much you really listen to hip-hop. And the Washington Post Social Reader tab will give a rundown of what news stories you’ve been following. (What used to be known as The Wall is demoted to just a tile on the new, Timelline-dominated profile.)
Cox says that instead of that brief conversation you used to get by scanning the previous version of the profile, visiting the profile will be the equivalent of going to a bar to have a long overdue five-hour soul exchange. “It’s that conversation where you play the jukebox till it runs out, the bar closes, and you walk about and say, ‘Man, that was really deep,’” he says.
The profile will be “a visual scrapbook of your life,” says Cox. At his F8 keynote Zuckerberg goes farther, calling it “the story of your life.” Visitors come by to learn about who you are in detail — it will almost be like being left alone in someone’s apartment and being able to check out their bookshelves, CD’s, refrigerator and even their pedometer — but people will actually spend endless time on their own profiles, not only organizing them but eventually hanging out there to reminisce about the past.
“You can really put a lot more of your life into Facebook,” says Dave Morin. And all of that is information that Facebook will store and potentially make use of. “Our primary business model and it always will be, is advertising,” says Dan Rose, Facebook’s VP of Platforms and Partnerships. “Our platform makes Facebook more interesting so people spend more time on it, because I’m learning about my friends and I’m sharing things about myself and I’m discovering new things. And it also makes it possible for us to put an ad in front of you that’s likely to be interesting to you.”
With a huge new source of personal information, Facebook can now serve some of most micro-targeted ads in history. You could probably call them nano-targeted ads.
Will users balk at all that information about them in the hands of a private company? Zuckerberg is used to that line of questioning, and clearly doesn’t think it’s interesting. He notes that Facebook will offer users multiple means to shield certain activities from some or all of their friends. This includes a clear permission form when you install an app. Then there’s an eyes-only activity stream that people can edit. They can limit sharing to certain lists of friends. And they can hold off on sharing a particular item.
Of course, traditionally very few software consumers alter the default settings of a product — and in the Open Graph the default setting seems to allow all your friends to see this stuff. Those who want to change it will have to spend time using Facebook’s tools to set who sees what.
Zuckerberg’s strongest argument is that, duh, this is Facebook. The service for sharing.
“The whole point of this is that you use this app instead of whatever you were using before — because you want to discover things about your friends and share your activities with them,’ he says. “We’re not trying to make everyone use this stuff. Everyone has to make a choice up front to use it, and I think they’ll be signing up pretty clearly because they want their friends to be able to see this stuff. They were probably be a set of people whose reaction is just, ‘Wow, I don’t want any service to know all of the stuff that I listen to, just because it is a lot of information.’ But our belief is that people own their data and they should be able to share it or put it wherever they want.”
Facebook is particularly confident that people are eager to share the media they consume—what they read, what they watch, and particularly what they listen and dance to. Naturally, the best showcase for that are the music applications rolling out today. “Music is such a great example for us because it’s so tied to people’s identities,” says Facebook CTO Bret Taylor. “People wear T shirts with their favorite artists on them—in high school I had patches on my backpack of the punk bands I listened to.”
Zuckerberg’s strongest argument is that, duh, this is Facebook. The service for sharing.
Facebook has long flirted with ideas to integrate music into the system, but Zuckerberg was particularly taken with Spotify, the Swedish-based service that offers both subscription and free versions. But though Facebook began working with Spotify last year of figuring out how to make music part of the Open Graph, its idea was to invite multiple services — indeed the launch partners besides Spotify include Rhapsody, MOG, Rdio, and even smaller ventures like the hot real-time listening experience Turntable.fm and a recent Y Combinator startup called Earbits.
This allows Facebook to get all the information about what people listen to without actually having to run a music service itself. Since Facebook offloads the actual streaming to its partners, there’s no need to negotiate licenses with music industry honchos. When people see on their newsfeed that friends have been listening to a new Wilco tune, a single click on the song title actually plays the song, through the third-party service. (It feels like it’s playing on Facebook.) If you’re not a member of the service, you automatically get signed up, via your Facebook information. This makes Facebook the prime way that these services will now sign up new users and the Open Graph has sparked a gold-rush level frenzy among the various services, who see a limited window to lay claim to the all-or-nothing network effects that will ultimately funnel users into a very few favored services. “It’s like going from Route 66 to a major highway,” says MOG CEO David Hyman.
The frontrunner in this race is Spotify, a service perfectly tailored to the new Facebook platform, especially since it has a free version that most of its users prefer. While specifying that he is playing no favorites, Facebook’s Dan Rose cites two aspects of Spotify that might give it an advantage over its rivals. “One is, they certainly have gone the deepest and farthest in making their product social from the ground up. And second, they have a business model that may be really aligned to the social discovery and serendipity that our platform is designed to enable. If I see that you’re listening to a song or an album or an artist and I want to hear it, I can do that with very little friction using Spotify.”
This has forced the other services to consider changing their own business plans to accommodate the new social age of music. For instance, David Hyman now is offering free option for MOG users who promiscuously spread their song choices — and lure more signups for MOG. When you join you are assigned a “gas tank” with a certain amount of songs in it — if you share promiscuously and your sharing winds up with your friends playing songs, MOG will top your tank. “The amount of free music you can get is based on how many friends you have,” he says. “If you’re really viral, you’ll never have to pay.” If it works, he says MOG could have a “Zynga-like viral effect” that benefits his company the same way Facebook catapulted the social gaming firm into stardom.
News articles might seem like a less promising category for social apps. Yet one of the most ambitious products launching at F8 is the Washington Post Social Reader. “Social is really important to the future of news,” says Don Graham, the CEO of the Washington Post (and a Facebook board member.) Basically, it lets users see what their friends read and vice versa, and the articles are not only from the Post and its properties like Slate and Foreign Policy, but partners like AP, Reuters, Mashable, SB Nation and Wetpaint. The equivalent of a front page drawn from this trove of journalism isn’t determined by a group of editors in a conference room determining importance of articles, but how popular those articles are among one’s friends. ”There will be some people who won’t want to do it, but for those who try it, it’s fun,” Graham says. Graham himself says that while he was the least likely person to take to such an approach, he is getting hooked on the test version he’s been using.
“Seeing news based on what your friends are reading is interesting,” says Vijay Ravindran, chief digital officer of the Washington Post. He says that when setting up how the Social Reader would work, his team asked, “What would Facebook do?” That helped them put the social aspect at the center, and the application is smart enough to figure out which articles you read aren’t so expressive (everyone probably will read about the hurricane coming through town) and which give useful hints to your unique interests (reading about Penn State football games might indicate your loyalty — and reading about Rick Santorium might indicate a possible vote). For now, the Social Reader doesn’t have its own privacy settings — it’s relying on Facebook’s inline controls — but Ravindran says that high on the coming feature list is a “hide” button for articles you don’t want others to know you’re reading.
Movies are part of the launch, too, notably with the participation of Netflix. As with some of the music and news services, users will get to see what friends have streamed, and vice versa. Oddly, Netflix once had a social element to its website. It was called Netflix friends, and it was not a success. According to the company, only two percent of its users made use of the feature. The obvious reason is that people were uncomfortable sharing what movies they watched. Netflix has another explanation. “We were ahead of our time,” says spokesperson Joris Evers. “Today people are more used to sharing their lives online.”
Netflix’s Facebook app will only be available overseas; users in the United States will have to do without. The reason, explains Evers, is the 1998 Video Privacy Protection Act. After information leaked out about Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s movie rentals, Congress imposed a strict privacy clamp on information about video-consumption, and the language in that act seems at odds with the Netflix app. The company is urging people to write their representative to adopt draft legislation that fixes the problem.
On one hand this is certainly an anomaly — there’s a big difference between a video store sharing your files with an investigator and a Facebook user consciously linking his or her video account to a social network. On the other hand, Netflix can’t offer its Facebook service—the one that works exactly the way all the other apps do — because the United States Congress believes it is an abuse of privacy.
When that law was passed in 1988 of course, legislators had no idea that an entire generation would regard sharing their activities and interests online as second nature. It does seem that millions already accept the tradeoff of traditional privacy to get the bounty of friend recommendations, updates on one’s social world, and opportunities for personal branding by one’s preferences. Facebook is wed to the premise that such activity is at the essence of what makes us human, and moving out of the darkness to share what you do, what you like and who you are is a liberating, enriching, and fun.
The Open Graph puts Facebook closer than ever to making this vision real, and Mark Zuckerberg is already reaping the benefits of his expanded platform. For months now he has been testing Open Graph applications among the small group of Facebookers and other insiders who have access to it. I ask him what he likes best about it.
“The thing I actually find the most interesting is discovering stuff about my friends,” he told me. “Which is why we created this in the first place.”
What has he learned about his friends?
“There’s these interesting patterns that happen in the world, and that person isn’t necessarily going to post an update about it,” he says. “You see who is into what. One day you see someone watching a few hours of TV in a row, and you’re just like, ‘Oh, this person must be sick at home today.’”
That brings up an interesting point. Here is Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, noticing from his employee’s activity on the Open Graph that instead of contributing to the social revolution, they are indulging in a “Breaking Bad” marathon. In such a case, does he call up and ask whether he planned to come to work that day?”
Zuckerberg thinks for a moment. “I ask them how they’re feeling,” he says.
One day in the not distant future, he might not have to ask. Depending on the right app and the right settings, Zuckerberg could be able to go to the employee’s Facebook profile page and check out his vital statistics from there. Cool.
