Can’t get enough of that Facebook Timeline? Want to copy it wholesale in your own Wordpress blog? Do you want to support an “Italian boy” named Julian? I bet you do.
We just got this excellent tip from Julian describing the process by which he created this very own theme, the aptly-named “Timeline-wp.” He wants no beef with Facebook and, while I find the adoption of an established megacompany’s brand and image slightly unbecoming and/or dangerous even for a private blog (and a bit shortsighted as Facebook will probably tear this design up by the time the next f8 rolls around), you can download and install the theme today at no cost to you. → Read More
After last year’s f8 keynote, my initial thought was pretty straightforward: I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet. Between the Like Button, the Open Graph, and the Open Graph API, I felt like we were shifting from Google being the fabric of the web, to Facebook taking over. A few days later, a now unpaid blogger declared it: The Age of Facebook.
Both of these declarations pissed a lot of people off.
Facebook is the new AOL! Walled garden! The end of open! Blah. Blah. Blah. While everyone else has been busy whining — including plenty of competitors — Facebook has been kicking ass and taking names. And today is proof of that. → Read More
A few days ago, leading up to f8, we noted that we heard from a source that Facebook would soon be expanding their buttons offerings beyond the Like button. Specifically, we heard that “Read” “Listen” and “Watch” buttons were coming. But today during the f8 keynote, Facebook didn’t have anything to say about those. But that doesn’t mean they’re not coming. Actually, they are.
I had the chance to sit down with Facebook CTO Bret Taylor after the keynote and he told me that a new “Read” button would be coming within the next couple of weeks. But it works a bit differently than you might imagine. → Read More
Today at Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off a huge change to the service: Timeline. It’s the Profile reborn, and it looks great. Later, Facebook’s head of product Chris Cox took the stage to talk about the feature’s inception.
Cox largely credits two people: Nicholas Felton and Sam Lessin.
Cox waxed poetic about Felton’s history. He gushed about Felton’s Feltron Annual Reports, which stared in 2005. “14 pages. One year. One book,” Cox noted. It was all about organizing the years of his life in a beautiful, visual way. “It was hard to call it anything other than what it really was — art,” Cox continued. → Read More
Netflix is coming to Facebook in a really social way. At Facebook’s F8 developer conference today, Mark Zuckerberg previewed how Facebook members will be able to see what movies or TV shows their friends have been watching on Netflix and click on the movie to watch it right there in Facebook. An overlay player pops up, and you can watch the movie without even leaving Facebook.
Netflix CEO and Facebook board member Reed Hastings spoke as well, and compared the experiencing of discovering new TV shows and movies on Facebook to Netflix’s own recommendation algorithm. “My friend did trumps the algorithm ,” says Hastings. If you’ve ever clicked on a YouTube video because you saw it in your Facebook News feed, you can imagine how you might click on a Netflix video as well (if you have the time to watch a longer video). But if you live in the U.S., you will have to imagine it because a privacy law in the U.S related video viewing data prevents Netflix from turning the app on in the U.S. It will, however, be available immediately in 44 other countries. Hastings noted that the law is in the process of being reviewed and might be overturned in the U.S.. → Read More
Facebook has just used their keynote at f8 to unveil a major new feature: Timeline. It’s your Profile re-imagined in a more visual way. “It’s the heart of your Facebook experience, completely re-thought from the ground up,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted.
So what does it look like? Check it out below. → Read More
Today at Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage to unveil the next evolution of the service. The first major change? The Profile.
Zuckerberg noted that the original Profile was sort of like the last five minutes of your life. The updated Proile from 2008 extended that to show what was sort of like the last 15 minutes or your life. The new Profile unveiled today is “the rest,” Zuckerberg noted. He calls this feature Timeline. → Read More
The cat is out of the bag that Facebook is going to launch something big at its developer conference f8 this week. We’ve heard about the social music services that could be debuting in a few days, but as the New York Times conveyed this past weekend, Facebook is planning for ways to surface personal content better. And we’ve heard from a source that Facebook will introduce new buttons on the wall that will begin introducing some granularity to the “Like” concept. We’re told these new buttons are “Read,” “Listened,” “Watched.” The network will also soon launch new social commerce buttons like “Want” following the introductions of the aforementioned buttons.
It’s important to qualify that this is from a source (and not from Facebook) but from what we hear, Facebook users will be able to click Read, Listened, Watched on content in their news feed. And soon, “Want” as well. → Read More
Facebook’s f8 is quickly approaching — by all accounts, it’s going to be massive. Ten days ago, I laid out some of what we were hearing would be coming. Now it’s time for one important update — for something not coming: Project Spartan.
Facebook’s HTML5 app project (which will not be called Spartan at launch) is ready to go. But the latest word is that Facebook is worried that the project is so ambitious and the ramifications of it will be so large that there’s some concern that it may overwhelm some of their other big announcements at their event. The fact is that they have so much coming that they don’t need to announce it just yet. → Read More
Yesterday, we outlined a bit of what we’ve heard about Facebook’s upcoming f8 conference. One big launch will be their official foray into music. Today, we’ve heard more about that launch.
One thing we’ve heard from a very good source is that a key aspect of the service will be “scrobbling”. The term, made popular by Last.fm, means that when you listen to a song, it gets sent to your profile without you have to do anything. I assume there will be a way to turn this off, or a way for you to selectively share songs, but this is a key to the service. → Read More
We’re now less than two weeks away from Facebook’s f8 conference. While it’s later than usual this year, Facebook uses the event to lay out their vision for the upcoming year and beyond. Typically, the event is big for developers, but this year may feature a few user-facing surprises as well. Here’s what we’ve heard so far.
As has been widely reported, Facebook’s music service is expected to be unveiled. Facebook is partnering with several prominent players in the streaming music space. Spotify, MOG, Rdio, etc — but again, don’t be surprised if Turntable.fm and maybe even Amazon are involved as well. The idea for the initial version of the product is all based around listening, but the roadmap is said to be larger. → Read More
Facebook took over the Gillmor Gang this week like it threatens to do the Web. Danny Sullivan represented those who fear the unadulterated market power of the social giant. He pressed FriendFeed co-founder and now Facebook platform chief Bret Taylor on the Pandora and Microsoft deals, which push user data to “partners” without user opt in. Taylor said these were carefully defined contracts that respected user privacy. Robert Scoble represented the happy user, listening to friend-seeded recommendations on Pandora. Andrew Keen represented his own peculiar subset of clueless netizens, entertaining us with a stylized version of Facebook’s onboarding interrogation: Who are you? What’s your favorite cereal? What constitutes an invasion of privacy? Taylor batted the gambit away, only to have Sullivan loop around to it later and give Keen’s schtick more credibility than I thought possible. All in all, a fun exercise that stayed away from the shrill quality of the underlying debate. It’s always amusing to see Google evangelists look with horror at Facebook exercising its social muscle, and Microsoft engineer Dare Obasanjo backing the Revenge of the Semantic Web as propelled by Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol. Much has been made of the varying degrees of authenticity of these open standards gurus turned partisans, but David Recordon (now of Facebook) won the round with his “Sure, some things Facebook launched are more “open” than others” setup. All of which suggests that no one and everyone is to be believed. Interestingly, like the debate over the iPad (bad, bad, bad… I’ll take two), the less “open” others Recordon mentions are being debated on pages that sport shiny new Facebook Like buttons at the top. And even as the partisans mount and unmount their soapboxes, others are busy taking ground by minimizing the differences between the dominant strategies. Already Twitter engineers are exploring building annotations on top of the Facebook structures, while PubSubHubbub moves toward JSON support. Like sausage making, the ugly process may actually be working. → Read More
Grab the popcorn. There is a serious nerd fight brewing.
Following Facebook’s big Open Graph announcements at f8 a couple days ago, many of the leaders of the so-called “open web” are taking exception to Facebook’s use of the term “open” for its grandiose plans. While the Open Graph may be a lot of things, it is not open, is the feeling many of them have, as Erick laid out earlier.
Specifically, most of them are targeting the new Like button that is appearing everywhere on the web (including on TechCrunch). It’s an obvious target as it’s the most visible part (at least so far) of the Open Graph protocol. Investor/Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon is leading the effort for a new OpenLike button (though he wants someone else to be in charge). And Google’s Open Web Advocate, Chris Messina, has already ripped apart Facebook’s Like button in a blog post. → Read More
When Paul Buchheit was at Google he was credited with coining the company’s unofficial slogan, “don’t be evil.” Now he’s at Facebook. Things change.
Today, at Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco, Buchheit’s FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor (both came over to Facebook after the acquisition) took the stage to show off a major new Facebook feature: a Like button for the web. Taylor announced that these buttons were ready to be implemented on sites across the web starting today. But as you’ll notice on this page, there’s a rather interesting option when you’re customizing the button. → Read More
Today at Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made what seemed like a bold prediction. Only he didn’t think it was that bold. According to Zuckerberg, there will be over 1 billion likes across the web in the just first 24 hours of the “Like” button. It launches today.
Zuckerberg can say this because there are already some 30 huge partners Facebook is launching these new features with. And I do mean huge. Huge as in CNN, ESPN, and IMDb, among others. Each of these sites will have Facebook buttons implemented and working today. → Read More
Today at Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco, the company have given all attendees a small RFID tag attached to their conference badge. This tag is a part of something called “Facebook Presence” which allows you to “check-in” at various places around the conference simply by swiping your badge. Yes, it’s location.
This is actually the same thing Facebook uses for its infamous keg bot at its headquarters. Employees have been using this for a long time, now they’re letting the rest of us in on the fun. To use it, you go to this page and manually type in your tag number to link it to your Facebook account. Then, everytime you swipe your badge somewhere, it goes right to your profile. Apparently, you can also tag yourself in photos this way. → Read More
There’s a lot of excitement about Twitter’s first conference, Chirp, which takes place next month in San Francisco. In fact, the tickets for the event, despite their $469 price, have been selling out quickly (they’ve been releasing them in waves). And today brings great news for those still clamoring to go: there is a new type of ticket, and they’re significantly cheaper.
Today, Twitter is putting on sale tickets for the second day of the conference for only $140 (yes, 140, like Twitter’s character limit). To be clear, this is just for the second day of the conference, but for those on a budget, it’s a much better deal to be able to take part in the event. The second day is the hack-a-thon event taking place at Fort Mason in the city. And it actually begins at 7 PM PT at the end of day one of the event, when Twitter buses people over from the Palace of Fine Arts, where the day one events (including the major keynotes from Twitter execs) take place. → Read More
Add one more piece of evidence to all of those rumors about an impending launch of a Facebook virtual currency at the upcoming f8 conference in late April. Facebook recently applied for a trademark for its virtual currency platform, which is aptly named Facebook Credits.
Included in the application is a drawing of the new Facebook payment platform logo (embedded above, although it could still change). It is a gold coin with a stylized globe in the middle and two arrows flying out of the globe perhaps symbolizing the free flow of virtual cash. A blue square with a small “f” is placed over the bottom right part of the coin → Read More
Back in December at Le Web, Twitter announced that it would hold its first-ever conference, Chirp, in San Francisco, in 2010. About a month later, they gave out the details, including that it would be taking place exactly a week before Facebook’s big conference, f8. Seeing as both are geared towards developers, it’s pretty clear they’re gunning for one another. But it seemed that f8 would have one large advantage: ticket price. But now it appears that may not be such an advantage.
The ticket page for f8 was briefly online earlier today at this URL. It appears that Facebook has since put it under password protection. But guess who was able to grab a screenshot? This guy. Notably, it appears that regular f8 tickets will be $325 this year. While that’s still about $140 cheaper (140, get it?) than Chirp, it’s not drastically cheaper, as many had been thinking. In the past, Facebook has sold tickets for $250, or even $150 if you signed up early. But, f8 still has one major price point advantage: tickets for students are only $50. → Read More
Back in December at Le Web, Twitter Director of Platform Ryan Sarver announced that Twitter would be holding the first conference of their own in 2010. Today, they’ve unveiled the details. Called Chirp, the conference will take place April 14 and 15 in San Francisco. Notably, this is exactly one week before Facebook’s big developer conference, f8, which will be April 21 and 22.
Day 1 of the Twitter conference will take place at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. This day will contain the meat of the schedule. Highlighted talking points include OAuth, streaming, geolocation, business strategies, mobile integration, and the product roadmap. Right now, the only highlighted speakers include Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone as well as COO Dick Costolo and Sarver, but you can expect more to be added. Day 2 will see the event move to the Herbst Pavilion in Fort Mason for a 24-hour “Hack Day” for Twitter third-party developers. Naturally, there will also be a big party after the conference with “free beer, food and music all night long.” No word on any performers yet, but you can be sure that much like f8, Twitter will bring in some big names to make their community happy. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
