Live From Facebook's Big Announcement

I'm here today live at Facebook's event at their headquarters in Palo Alto. Mark Zuckerberg has just begun talking to discuss what they are announcing today including confirming that the company was in a lockdown mode. Mark is continuing to discuss what has been rolled out over the past few months and has promised that the announcement today is not what anybody would expect. So now Mark is discussing how the company is focused on building a social platform. [10:45 PST] He says it's hard to get the dynamics right but more importantly it's difficult making it possible for you to bring your connections across all places that you go around the web. The first thing is ensuring that can take their information to another service and accomplish that in a safe way. Over the past few years Facebok has been focusing on building Connect and now they are on over 1 million sites. [10:49 PST] Mark says people haven't been able to download their information until now. Today he's announcing a new product that lets users download their information and David Recordon will come up to discuss that. [10:50 PST] Mark explains that another component of making it efficient to bring your information anywhere on the web is knowing how applications use your information. Up until now there has been no way to accomplish that. That's the second part of the Facebook announcement. There's now a new dashboard called "Apps that you use" and all your information will be available to be downloaded into a single zip file. [10:55 PST] The next product manager is up to discuss the 'products that you use' page, which provides users with a detailed access log of all API calls that are being made by applications. [10:57 PST] Mark is back to discuss what he considers "the biggest problem in social networking" - the fact that people have segmented groups of friends. He says until today Facebook has made it pretty easy to share with everybody on your site or just your friends, but for a lot of people "just your friends" isn't really private. The goals of the new changes are to make it easier to "map all real-world groups", enable everyone to participate, and make information useful in lots of contexts. [11:01 PST] So how do you make this easier? Mark says the naive solution is to do something like "friend lists". Actually, he says the first naive solution is to have users select individually who they want to map out information with every single time. Another solution is to create friend lists that make things a little bit easier but nobody actually wants to make lists. Unfortunately only 5 percent of people make lists. [11:04 PST] The next solution is the "Algorithmic solution" which is based on how often you are interacting with people. Inside the company we have something called "coefficient" which is a large-scale index of all interactions that can determine who close you are to other people. Mark has the chat interface displayed. It shows that it's not alphabetical and it displays the friends you are most likely to interact with. [11:06 PST] There's a problem with this though, Mark says. You may be interacting with a carpenter who's working on your house but you don't have a strong relationship with them. Nobody wants to ever see a list of people they are closest with. Facebook never shows you an interface where they display people who they think are the closest because it's "too close". [11:08 PST] Even if Facebook could develop the most perfect algorithmic solution, it still wouldn't be the best solution, Mark says. For all these reasons there are real bounds on how far you can get algorithmically. Unfortunately you can't group people automatically. There are also "social solutions" to problems. Mark is illustrating how photo tagging was the simplest solution (and not machine generated) and it was the best solution. Facebook staff think over the next few years there are going to be an increasing number of problems that are social, and if they give users the right tools they're going to be able to solve it this way. [11:11 PST] Just like photos, groups have the property that not everybody has to set them up themselves. Other people will be able to create groups and we'll apply those to other users. Facebook now has an upgraded groups product that includes group chat, shared spaces, and email lists. Mark thinks this product will blow all other group solutions away. [11:14 PST] Justin Schaefer is now coming up to discuss the new groups product. "Every group represents a shared space among friends". He might event bring up group chat and get an immediate response. The new groups look much more like Places. These groups also function much more like mailing lists. They're also releasing the mobile interface for groups today. There's also a documents feature that functions like a wiki for groups. Today Facebook is also announcing a Graph API for groups. Schaefer says they also are hoping to be able to extend the functionality of groups through extended interfaces from applications. [11:19 PST] Chris Cox has now come up to discuss the more abstract aspects of this announcement. The interactions of one person with the product affect and organize the interactions around them. (Our interpretation is that groups is being used to determine how friends will be organized into lists moving forward). [11:23 PST] Our model is about designing a space. The focus is on giving people more control and more confidence. Now we're going to take some questions. I asked about whether or not groups will be replacing friends lists and Mark responded flat out "No". However he emphasized that users will be able to communicate with these groups via any publisher and anywhere on the web through the Graph API. [11:31 PST] Irina Slutsky from Ad Age asked Mark about how brands will interact with groups. Ultimately Pages are for brands, according to Mark. [11:33 PST] After taking a question for the audience Justin Schaefer states that users can leave groups at any point and then they must explicitly add themselves or approve themselves more visibility. [likebox text='Become a fan of AllFacebook to stay up to date on all the latest Facebook news.'] We'll be posting more detailed information about today's announcements following this article. Thanks for following!

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Live From Facebook's Big Announcement

Nick O'Neill

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Nick O'Neill