Last night Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive did it again: he made the web even more social. And naturally, he put Facebook at the heart of it.
At f8, Facebook’s annual developers conference in San Francisco, an increasingly polished and media savvy Zuckerberg took to stage to explain the site’s latest makeover – after a little aside in which he told the crowd that the site had managed to attract half a billion users in a single day.
After the cheers and whooping, which have become customary at these American live-streamed tech bonanzas, Zuckerberg introduced the ‘Timeline’.
The concept of Timeline, is that users put their entire lives on Facebook, organized by days, months and years. And then they can fill in the blanks – right back to their births.
Scan in baby pictures, upload old home movies, load in maps to chart memorable journeys – Facebook wants everyone’s life story loaded into its system.
Zuckerberg and his team have been working on this radical makeover of the profile pages for the last 12 months, and did it because people couldn’t easily find the chats and stuff they shared from years ago.
And there are some lovely additions – such as the large background photo behind the profile picture – which makes each user’s page look more like a personalized website, rather than a subsection of Facebook.
Interestingly Timeline looks a little like the Flipboard, the social media magazine iPad app, but instead of aggregating and displaying media content beautifully, it shows off each user’s personal content.
Then came the announcement of media and content arriving onto Facebook. Partnerships with the likes of Spotify, The Washington Post and Netflix finally take Facebook into a world of content. Until now the users have had to bring the content to Facebook and after that, they have had to leave the site to see the material or listen to the song.
Now this ‘new breed of content apps’ will all appear in the Facebook News Feed and be watched, listened to or read, without leaving the site.
Facebook has just moved one step closer to becoming a web within the web – and certainly even nearer to becoming the social platform of the whole web – in spite of Google’s best efforts with Google+
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