Facebook on Thursday began turning profile pages into interactive digital scrap books that that let members of the world’s leading online social network tell the stories of their lives.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the annual f8 developers conference in San Francisco by introducing ‘timeline’ pages that let people digitally map everything they’ve ever done. “The heart of your Facebook experience, completely rethought from the ground up,” Zuckerberg said. “timeline is the story of your life.”
He demonstrated by showing how his new profile page chronicled his experiences from meeting US President Barack Obama to baby photos. “The biggest challenge was to tell the story of your life in a single page,” Zuckerberg said.
“What timeline does is show all the recent activity and then as you go back in time it starts summarizing the things you’ve done in your life.” The latest changes at Facebook include a new class of “open graph” applications that let people discover and share music, movies, books and news as well as seemingly lightweight experiences like bicycle rides.
Software apps made by more than a dozen developers, including Spotify, will let Facebook members easily listen along to tunes with friends. “It’s a big day for everyone who loves music,” said Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek said.
Zuckerberg heralded the arrival of Facebook applications that let people automatically allow chosen friends see what they do or experience without needing to click “Like” or “Share” buttons. “It will be a wildly popular feature,” Spotify chief content officer Ken Parks told AFP. “It is a big step forward for Facebook.” For example, Spotify will let Facebook users see what friends are listening to at any moment in “Ticker” real-time feeds and then listen along by clicking on a post.
“It really wrings the friction out of the process,” Parks said. The same principle will apply to computer or mobile gadget applications for digital books, news, and films. “Now, you don’t just have to ‘Like’ a book, you can read it,” he explained. “You can connect to anything you want; it’s simple but it is really powerful.”
Facebook had no plans for an “app store” along the lines of the one run by Apple at its online iTunes shop. Facebook will leave it to members to spread media sharing applications. People will need to install third party applications to share snippets in timeline profile pages, which will feature privacy controls. Applications will also require people to set data sharing “permissions” before they are used. Facebook users this week had taken to complaining about the barrage of recent updates intended to make it easier to manage the torrents of updates from friends at the social network. Palo Alto, California-based Facebook hit a new milestone this month with a half-billion people using the social network in a single day, according to Zuckerberg.
