SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook wants to pervade the Internet, turning every website into a de facto page at the world’s leading online social network.
FACEBOOK FUTURE: Zuckerberg delivers the opening keynote address at the f8 Developer Conference in San Francisco, California. — AFP photo
Facebook rolled out a series of features in what was pitched as an inevitable evolution to people taking online identities and friends with them wherever they roam on the Internet.
“Until recently, most things online aren’t social or don’t use your real identity,” said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
“This is really starting to change.” Zuckerberg outlined his vision of an “open graph” after making a rock star entrance to applause at the California firm’s annual ‘f8’ developers conference in San Francisco.
“Today, the Web exists as a series of unstructured links between pages,” said Zuckerberg, whose social network boasts more than 400 million users around the globe. “The open graph puts people at the centre of the Web.”
As an example he described how a Facebook user could go to Internet radio station Pandora or sports-focused ESPN online and automatically share musical tastes or game news with their pals in the world’s leading online community.
“Pandora will be able to start playing music from bands you have liked all across the Web,” Zuckerberg said. “It can show you which friends like music similar to what you are listening to, then you can click and listen to their collections.”
Facebook vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer compared the broader opportunities to share experiences and interests to “the restaurant where the maitre d’ knows your name and that you like window tables.
“It is an inherently better experience,” he told AFP.
Freshly launched tools let developers install Facebook’s recently adopted “Like” icons that let people signal interests with a single click and share them automatically with friends at participating websites.
“People can have instantly social and personalized experiences everywhere they go,” Zuckerberg said.
Movie website IMDb and technology colossus Microsoft, which owns a minor stake in Facebook, were among some 70 websites that have been testing the new software and have it in place.
“You want to share stuff you care about with people you care about,” Microsoft general manager of Future Social Experiences Labs told AFP at f8.
“It’s really about people.” Microsoft used Facebook tools to let members of the social network share online documents. — AFP