FACEBOOK F8 ROUND-UP: the social web, Microsoft, privacy, Like and new data rules

A round up from Facebook’s 2010 f8 conference in San Francisco.

F8 brings together the developers and entrepreneurs who are building the social web by moving fast, taking risks, and hacking traditional systems.

From Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “Today at our third f8, we are making it so all websites can work together to build a more comprehensive map of connections and create better, more social experiences for everyone.

“Facebook has always focused on building ways for people to connect with each other and share information with their friends. We think this is important because people are shaping how information moves through their connections. People are increasingly discovering information not just through links to web pages but also from the people and things they care about. This flow of social information has profound benefits – from driving better decisions to keeping in touch more easily – and we’re really proud that Facebook is part of the shift toward more social and personalized experiences everywhere online.”

“Today at our third f8, we are making it so all websites can work together to build a more comprehensive map of connections and create better, more social experiences for everyone. We have redesigned Facebook Platform to offer a simple set of tools that sites around the web can use to personalize experiences and build out the graph of connections people are making.”

For your eyes only: Privacy

Facebook is getting rid of restrictions that developers can only store user data for 24 hours in a move that could rekindle privacy concerns. The company said the reason for the change was primarily technical as the restrictions have been difficult for developers to work around, the company said.

“We heard that developers had to build different code paths to comply with this policy. That became a huge part of their decision of whether to integrate with Facebook,” Zuckerberg said. The company said the original intent of the old policy was to make sure user data stayed up to date in other applications. It allowed developers to subscribe to user data as people changed their profiles.

Historically, Facebook has always struggled with balancing the twin goals of enabling valuable web experiences through its data and offering granular control over how that information is distributed.

Plotting along: Graph

Facebook has launched a powerful set of features that aims to compel publishers across the web to organize their content for sharing and indexing by the social network. The company released a Graph application programming interface that allows publishers to tag their content by type.

“You can represent any real-world object on the internet using this open graph protocol,” said Bret Taylor, the company’s director of product. “The web has been connected by hyperlinks, between static pages of content. We think that connections between people is more important.”

Taylor said the company had overhauled its technical infrastructure to accommodate this idea.

He loves me, he loves me not: Like

A second piece of Facebook’s strategy is a “Like” button for the web that will easily share content back to the social network. Between Facebook’s launch partners, the company estimates that it will serve 1 billion Facebook “like” buttons by the end of the day. At a session on the new plug-ins, Facebook indicated that it was deprecating its share buttons in favor of the new “Like” buttons.

That real-time data on user’s preferences will give the company an accurate real-time barometer of influential sites across the web, beyond the links that Facebook users are already sharing with their friends on its own website.

Crunching the numbers: data

Facebook will also offer analytics back to publishers using the API and buttons, providing them with data on how widely distributed their content becomes through the network.

Office space: Docs.com

Microsoft and Facebook have teamed up to launch a site called Docs.com, which is all about sharing your documents using Facebook in the cloud. Facebook didn’t offer too many details, but said the document site will work closely with the social network. If you want to share a document on Facebook, you can do so using the connections you’ve already built on the social network.

Built on Microsoft Office 2010, the Docs app enables Facebook users for the first time to create and share Microsoft Office documents directly with their Facebook friends, using the Office tools they already know.

Caught in the social web: Plugins

And finally, Facebook is launching a series of plugins that will dramatically expand its presence across the web.

“Social plugins are a way you can provide an instantly personal experience with one line of HTML,” said Bret Taylor, the company’s director of product.

All of these pieces form the basis of what Facebook says is a new philosophy for the web — one that is centered around people and their real affiliations. That’s instead of hyperlinks and pages, which have formed a rough proxy for these real connections over the past two decades.

These new plugins include:

•A ‘Like’ button for the web: A frictionless way of sharing content back on Facebook. Between Facebook’s launch partners, the company estimates that it will serve 1 billion Facebook “like” buttons by day-end. That real-time data on people’s preferences will give the company an accurate real-time barometer of influential sites across the web.

•Activity streams: What a user’s friends have done on the site

•Recommendations: Personalized content recommendations from a site

•The Facebook login the company offers on external sites will also look different: It will show the person’s friends who have already joined the site.

•On top of that, there is a Meebo-like bar that publishers can install at the bottom of their page so that visitors can chat with their friends while browsing a site.

Most importantly, the company launched powerful set of features that will compel publishers across the web to organize their content for sharing and indexing by the social network.