After f8 - Resources for Building the Personalized Web
By Sandra Liu Huang
Thanks to all of you who made f8 such a great event — from the more than 1,500 attendees to the 120,000 people who joined us on f8 Live, our live stream channel. Below is a summary of our new tools, how to start using them, and links to resources from f8.
Guide to New Developer Tools
At f8, we announced several new tools and features for developing with Facebook Platform. We've created an upgrade guide to give you more details on new products, specifically:
- Graph API: Our redesigned core API with powerful features like search, real-time updates, and authentication with OAuth 2.0, a standard we've co-authored with the open community.
- Unified data permissions dialog and new data policies: Giving users more control and greater transparency over their data, and making integrating with Facebook Platform easier for developers.
All the existing APIs, original JavaScript client, and authentication system will continue to work. Read our upgrade guide for more details, especially if you have existing applications or websites which are integrated with Facebook.
Facebook Connect
As you may have seen, we're transitioning away from the Facebook Connect brand to reflect that there is one underlying platform behind any integration with Facebook, whether you are building an application on Facebook.com, a website, or on a device. This change has no impact for the 250,000 sites using Facebook Connect today. All the same technologies exist on Facebook Platform, so no transition is needed. An option you may want to consider, though, is using either the "Login with Facebook" button or our new button with faces, which have seen higher conversion rates.
More on Social Plugins and the Open Graph
At f8, we also launched new tools called social plugins — including the Like button, Activity Feed, and Recommendations — on more than 75 websites. Already, just one week since launch, more than 50,000 sites across the Web have implemented the new plugins. We are thrilled by the strong adoption so far as developers realize how easy social plugins are to use and how powerful they are in engaging users in a frictionless experience without requiring them to share any personal information.
To support these plugins, we launched the Open Graph protocol, with which you can add metadata to any Web page so that it can be represented within any social graph.
Just as we provide each person on Facebook with a unique experience via News Feed, you can now do the same with your site through these basic tools. We can't wait to see what you build.
Wrapping up f8 2010
Those at f8 were the first non-Facebook employees to experience Presence, an internal Hackathon project that functioned as a system at f8 where attendees could swipe their badges and easily share their activities and even get their photos taken, tagged, and shared. More than 1,200 people interacted with Presence at f8, 1,400 photos were taken at photo booths, and people published more than 2,600 stories to their News Feeds.
While f8 was going on in San Francisco, more than 300 members of the European developer community celebrated f8 simultaneously in London. At the Facebook Developer Garage London, attendees connected with Facebook employees and European launch partners to discuss news from f8.
If you missed f8, or want to relive the keynotes and sessions, you can view recorded videos on f8 Live.
Be sure to visit our new developer site, complete with products, documentation, and tools. You'll also find a showcase of how sites around the Web are using social plugins.
You can direct your questions to the Developer Forum, and share your new implementations on the Facebook Platform Page.
Sandra, a product marketing manager on the Facebook Developer Network team, is liking things all over the Web.
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