At F8 this year, Facebook introduced sweeping changes to their service that are likely to change the way we all use it. To summarize, they announced:
- Timeline – your profile is about to transform into a digital scrapbook containing all of your posts from when you joined Facebook until now, leaving you opportunities to fill in the blanks all the way back to when you were born, if you included that information. As of this writing, Facebook is engaged in a lawsuit from Timelines.com over trademark and therefore not releasing Timeline, but anyone can enable it by using the developer option.
- Open Graph API – a new programming interface that enables Instant Sharing and “real time serendipity,” allowing applications to feed updates into the Timeline as they happen.
- Ticker – a real time livestream of your friends’ updates in a sidebar.
- A Subscribe button allowing you to subscribe to someone’s public updates without having to be their friend.
- New friends lists allowing you to put your friends in groups that help you determine what you share with them.
- Updated privacy options to match the new features.
- A news feed relevancy filter that reorganizes what you see on in your Home stream.
- Pages can no longer send messages.
- A Friend Activity Tab (currently on Place Pages.)
- The 500-character limit on updates has been increased to 5000 characters.
- Posts on Facebook Pages are now visible to non-Likers.
Some of the implications of this:
- Facebook could become a lot more noisy, with real time updates happening in the sidebar, your friends’ apps sharing updates instantly and automatically, and being able to see updates from people you haven’t friended.
- Instant sharing means we need to be more conscious of what our apps are sharing automatically. They’ll ask for permission only once, the first time. Parents, heads up.
- Nature abhors a void, as do humans. Timeline will provide temptations to overshare, to fill in the empty spaces if nothing else.
- With the combination of the new Subscribe button, Open Graph, Instant Sharing, improved privacy options to manage who sees what and the ability to have people subscribe to your public updates if you’ve hit the 5000 friend limit, profiles have become a viable platform for some businesses and entrepreneurs to share and engage with less effort than before, without a real need for a Business Page, which many see as just another thing to manage.
- The large (850×315) cover image in your new profile is a huge opportunity to market your message.
- Until we know what’s going to happen with Facebook Business Pages, we’re likely to see shifts in behavior in the way businesses people use profiles.
What are your thoughts about the Facebook changes? Do they affect how you or your clients use Facebook?
