Hacking The Graph: Live From Facebook's f8 Conference

I’m at the Design Center in San Francisco, where Facebook is holding its third f8 developers’ conference. For weeks we’ve been tracking the new features we believe will be launching today, including a Like Button for the entire Internet, Facebook auto-Connect on some partner sites, and a Meebo Bar clone.

I’ll be liveblogging Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote which is slated to being at 10:00AM PST. And you can watch the live stream of the event below.

10:11 AM: Zuckerberg has just taken the stage.
There are a few key themes we will be talking about today. The first is the Open graph. Today teh web exists mostly as a series of unstructured links between pages. The open graph puts people at the center.

Second theme: Using the open graph to make instantly social and personalized experiences everywhere you go. We’ve learned from Connect that social experiences are a lot more engaging for people.

We’re making this completely simple to do.

Updates: At last f8, just shy of 100 million. Now more than 400 million. Taken us only 3 years to 100 million users on mobile. Took just a little longer than 1 year to get 100 million using Connect.

We’re going to combine all the permissions dialogs that you use using Connect into a single Permissions dialog. Someone comes to a site. You show them a dialog that shows all the permissions you need. They click once.

Second change: We had a policy where you couldn’t store or cache data for more than 24 hours. We’re getting rid of it. (We reported this last month.

Credits: Right now in the ecosystem a lot of developers are building up stores of credit cards of users. Our goal with credits is that people can use single currency in every app. Will be a lot better for applications; lower friction. We have almost 100 different apps in our credits program so far (we’re still in closed beta).

The Open Graph: introduced at first f8. Yelp is mapping the graph related to businesess. Pandora is mapped to music. If we can take these maps of the graph, we can take a web that is more social personalized smarter and semantically aware. That’s what we’re focusing on today. One of the core ideas of social graph is that a person or object is defined by the other people/things they’re connected to.

Yelp knows who I am, what I’m connected to, so they can give me a snice social experience. A lot of this is possible today. What isn’t possible is to take a part of this graph that Yelp has mapped out and connect that to other parts of the graph.

We awant to have instantly social and peronsalized expeirences everywhere users go.

The first is a new version of the Graph API. Second, we’re doing Social Plugins to make your site instantly personalized.

Go to CNN and you can see three of your sites like the story. Haven’t connected. haven’t logged in. They’ve used social plugin, and Facebook serves content directly do me. They can show my friends who like it without CNN knowing who I am.

CNN Homepage: Have a widget with Recent Activity, shows all the things your friends have liked, without having to login or Connect.

Head of Platform Products: Bret Taylor has taken the stage.

We think Facebook Platform can be both powerful and simple. Social plugins: A Like Button will let you share with one click, without having to login.

Like button will power a suite of plugins. One is the Activity Stream Plugin. Shows your user the likes and comments restricted to your site’s domain. It’s on the CNN.com homepage.

Also launching Reommendations plugin. Personalized recommendation service for your site. We’ll find the content we think is most relevant. Not just most emailed articles.

For those of you using Facebook Connect for Login. The login plugin will show a standard login button, and show profile pictures of user’s friends that have already joined your site.

Finally the social bar (similar to the Meebo bar). Docks to the bottom of the screen. Has chat, a like button. Pictures of your other friends who are on that site.

Where do Likes go when they make it to Facebook.com? When I Like something, it’s only in my feed for a few hours.

Second Product Announcement: The Open Graph Protocol.A spec for a set of meta tags you can use to markup page. Tell you what tiype or real world project your page represents.

In case of Pandora. Use this protocol to connect a song to your Facebook profile.

As of today, there will be a Like button on every Movie Page on IMDB. Hit like on IMDB, that will go to FB stream. They’re using the Open Graph protocol. We know that it represents a movie. Hit ‘Like’ on The Godfather. It will go under my favorite Movies on Facebook.

Launching with 30 partners. Using open graph protocol. Connecting real world things you like to social graph. CNN, ESPN, IMDB, Pandora.

For years we’ve been saying FB is an open platform. For first time Likes, Interests in my profile link to pages off of Facebook.com My identity isn’t just defined by things on FB. It’s defined by things all around the web. We think the connections between people/things they care about will be as big as hyperlinks.

Third Product Announcement: The Graph API. We’ve rearchitected FB Platform from ground up with simplicity/stability in mind. http://graph.facebook.com/

Should only need web browser and curl. Shouldn’t need SDK or documentaion to download piece of data from FB. Every object in FB has a unique ID, be it user profile, event, etc. To download, just download graph.facebook.com/btaylor. You can download JSON representation of my profile there. Connections are represented equally eloquently.
graph.facebook,com/btaylor/likes. graph.facebook.com/btaylor/friends. etc. Applies to every single object in FB.

Search. 400 million users sharing 25 billion things a month. Now devs will be able to search all public updates on Facebook.

Also baking in Real-TIme into the API. Using Webhooks, you can register callback to FB, we’ll ping you every time user updates profile, posts new wall post. Today if you wanted to keep local copy up to date, you have to poll our server all the time. Now you register a callback URL, we’ll tell you when the user updates their profile. Now when I update my profile, every app integrated with FB will be updated instantly.

Finally, revamping the way authentication works. Together with industry leaders we’ll adopt oAuth 2.0. The first reason this is cool: it’s an industry standard. Code you write will work equally well expect standard to be widely adopted. It’s objectively more awesome. It’s just simple.

Zuckerberg is back on stage.

We’ve worked closely with 75+ different partners to get ready for this. When we launch later today, we expect 24 hours, we expect to serve 1 billion like buttons.

Web is at important turning point. Until recently, default on web has been that most things aren’t social and don’t use real identity. We’re seeing more startups requiring all users to Connect so they have real friends/identity with them through the entire experience. Now even more sites will use social plugins. Building toward a web where the default is social.

One more cool thing (a glimpse of the future). When we wondered what would happen if we worked with a small group of trusted companies if users didn’t have to click Connect. What if they already knew public info of public users. Worked with Microsoft (Docs.com).

Microsoft is announcing Docs.com. Online version of Office Suite. Makes it easy to share and collaborate with friends online. one of friends writes up a document. Share it, goes to Docs.com. Share it with you, you go to Docs.com without having to reauthenticate. Immediately can get started. All the power of Microsoft office suite online with simple FB integration. This is built with the ground up with assumption that every user has real idenitfy and friends. Will be avialable later today at Docs.com.

Another example: Pandora. Now for the first time when you go to Pandora it will be able to start playing music from bands you’ve liked all across the web.