Facebook ropes in huge interface and core changes at the f8

At the annual f8 conference today, Facebook rolled out some massive changes to the social network’s entire user interface and experience along with updates to its social graph. Following its recent minimal inclusions like the ticker, intelligent feeds, and smart lists; Facebook today introduced new user profiles – they call it the Timeline. (video attached below.)

The new user profile – The Timeline

Keeping the importance of past posts in mind, and keeping the fact how the old stories of users – the updates, important milestones and memories, old photo albums – were virtually going to trashcan, Facebook developed the Timeline; and this time they have been spot-on. The new Timeline as you can see in the pictures – is. really. cool. Really, really cool. At the top is the Cover (see image) which you change as per your liking; your profile picture still stays around. And scrolling down, the timeline covers everything that’s important. It leaves out the not important stuff, using Facebook’s algorithms.

The catch is – you can edit your timeline the way you want. The timeline has a bar on the right showing years. Clicking, for example, on 2008 – will take you to that person’s 2008. And that’s nice. The timeline is awesomely visual, thanks to Nicolas Felton (smart design guy) who Facebook hired to help them design a new user profile.

In Chris Cox’s words who is the VP of Product Development at Facebook consider the timeline as a person’s annual report.

Apps integration in the Timeline

The timeline also bundles up apps (see image on the left) – social apps as Facebook calls them. What are apps? All the games, quizzes, etc. you play on Facebook are apps. But today changes that. There are going to be better apps. Apps for music, apps for TV, apps for books, apps for magazines, apps for cooking, apps for running, and apps for what f’in not.

These new social apps are built around especially for Facebook and it’s really, really cool. I’m sorry using really, really cool in redundant manner, but then the updates seem it’s really, really cool. For the sake of being non-technical, I’m going to take a few examples to explain the apps stuff.

So let’s say you start using an app like Spotify, a music streaming service – awesome way of listening music. Now Spotify is one of Facebook’s partners and has built a seamless canvas app for Facebook. Using Spotify you can stream all sorts of music, online, for free and with its Facebook integration you can share whatever you are listening to with your friends directly in your ticker. This information, if you want, can also go in your timeline. (See video below) So if 5 of your friends are listening to Elvis, the ticker will show they are playing Elvis. Clicking the ticker will let you play Elvis as well. And this kind of integration works with dozens of social apps – movie apps, books apps, news apps, music apps and lifestyle apps – there are all sort of apps.

Such kind of seamless integration has been possible due to Facebook’s update to its social graph, which it now calls the open graph. Let’s not get technical. Big question is, when is all this coming out?

Well, the social apps will be available as soon as the Timeline is available. And the Timeline (in Beta) has slowly started rolling out to small number of users. It will be gradual and expect it the roll-out to go on for a few months before everyone gets a hold of it.

Good or bad, you may ask. Good I say. Timeline is wonderful. However once we start taking a deeper look into how the social apps work, we’ll get a clear picture. We’re not sure how privacy concerning the open graph can go so it could still go the either way. And then the biggest question is about acceptance. Of course Facebook now has 800 million active users and majority of them have invested quite a lot in the service that it’s almost impossible to leave it for a while. But you never know.

The Timeline and this awesome social integration make the cost of leaving Facebook and switching to something else even more heavy. Today changes everything. Today makes Google+, a service which was a strong Facebook competitor until 3 hours ago, look really dumb in competition.

Be whatever it may be, one thing is for sure – with today’s updates Facebook has taken a huge leap leaving its competitors far behind. It’s a nice punch in Google’s face; it’s also showing others how dominating it is in the market now almost becoming THE social layer of the web.