Facebook is ready to unleash a string of verbs into your Timeline. According to a report from AllThingsD, the Facebook Open Graph will be unleashed on the ecosystem this week bringing more "read, watch, listen" applications to the social platform. Open Graph apps that track what you eat, where and how far you run and what purchases you make could be announced as early as tomorrow.
Open Graph apps are the final installment of what Facebook announced at its f8 Developers' Conference in San Francisco last September. Open Graph apps are the coup de grace to Timeline. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time, "We think that people are going to want to share all kinds of things with their lives and we think that apps are the way they want to show them."
Facebook is an accepted means of communication. It is a never-ending virtual social gathering filled with adopted puppies, cute LOL kitties, baby announcements, viral articles and videos, events, groups, organizations and fan pages. But why do people really use it?
A new study entitled "Why do people use Facebook?" from Boston University's Ashwini Nadkarni and Stefan G. Hofmann proposes that the social network meets two primary human needs: (1) the need to belong and (2) the need for self-presentation. The study also acknowledges demographic and cultural factors as they relate to the belonging need, and the variation of personality types on Facebook usage.
No matter how many times I tell Facebook I want it to display the most recent updates from my friends first, it keeps reverting to highlighted stories. You can (attempt to) influence Facebook's sorting by manually tagging stories, but if Facebook really wants to separate the wheat from the chaff I can think of a few ways to do it.
Some say there are only seven basic literary plots in all the stories in the world. Likewise, you can boil down most Facebook updates into a handful of types – and I think many users would love to be able to filter out at least five of those types.
Ever wondered which musician has the fastest growing Facebook Page? Or what TV series? A new beta service called SocialMedia-live is tracking the growth rate of 38 million Facebook Pages, with 2 million of those available to view. It has statistics on total number of likes, fan growth, interesting newcomers and male/female breakdown. These statistics are categorized and users can create comparison graphs. The bad news is that there is no apparent search function.
The answer to the first question, by the way, is Adele, who gained 175,000 followers over the last 24 hours (at time of writing). Adele's popularity on Facebook is mainly due to her female fans; 62% are female and 38% male. The fastest growing TV show is Mob Wives, perhaps thanks to the current "swear jar sweepstakes" promotion on its Facebook Page. This type of data is useful, albeit limited at this point.
The world's biggest social network wants to change the way you share TV shows, music and games. Think frictionless sharing meets social TV for all media. Given what Facebook recent announcements about integration with cameras and cars, is full media integration? If you're still unsure, take a hint from this: Earlier this week, Facebook announced frictionless sharing for your TV with Boxee.
Facebook has already changed the way we communicate, creating virtual extensions of our real lives. Social networks are a microcosm of users' social worlds and a continuation of offline behaviors. But that's just for the regular folk - what about artists? How do artists use Facebook to augment their existing work, discuss ideas related to the work and think about the idea of online community?
To find out, I asked three artists who are rather active on Facebook: BRAVO art-reality TV star Young-Sun Han, San Francisco-based artist and GAP Storyteller Jason Hanasik and international artist Martha Rosler.
Looking for a quick pick-me-up in those late afternoon hours, I've found myself heading over to my Spotify account to check out what Facebook friends are listening to. While this has been a neat way to notice shared music tastes, there's still something awkward about it. Unless I've already had some sort of communication about music with a friend on Spotify, or at least some recent contact on Facebook or otherwise, I feel weird scrolling through their playlists.
Facebook must have foreseen this problem because today it announced yet another way to listen to music through your account. The catch here is that you're actually listening with your friends rather than voyeuristically peering into their playlists and, unbeknownst to them, clicking on their songs.
Whether you love it or hate it, Facebook's so-called frictionless sharing concept isn't going away anytime soon. From songs played on Spotify to articles read on the Washington Post, everything your friends consume via participating sites is broadcast to the news ticker in real time.
Today, the social TV and streaming media center service Boxee became the latest to join in on the trend when it announced a new partnership with Facebook. Users who opt in can automatically update Facebook about TV shows and other videos they watch through Boxee's interface.
Today Facebook announced the comments box plugin for mobile, which will automatically appear on the mobile version of the sites that have already integrated the Facebook comments box plugin. Gannet newspaper sites including the Statesman Journal (Salem, Oregon), Burlington Free Press (Burlington, VT) and the Detroit Free Press are already using the Facebook comments box plugin.
On Monday, Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin staged the first production of a play live on Facebook. The play was a stage adaptation of the novel "Effi Briest" by Theodor Fontaine.
According to Reuters, the online production, Effi Briest 2.0, "used status updates, photo uploads and wall postings from characters to relate protagonist Effi Briest's descent into disrepute." The Facebook experiment was a way to do a spectacularly different pre-dress dress rehearsal prior to the play's in-the-flesh opening this Saturday.
