Facebook’s ‘frictionless’ Open Graph apps to arrive tomorrow

17 Jan 2012

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Some of the frictionless sharing apps that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled last year at F8 – key to his Open Graph and which turn the activities of Facebook users from nouns to verbs – are expected to be rolled out tomorrow.

According to AllThingsDigital, the new apps will allow users say more about what they are doing. A bevy of new apps from Spotify, Netflix and Hulu that were launched in recent months on Facebook made it possible for Facebook users to not just ‘Like’ something but tell their friends what songs they enjoyed or what movies they watched.

Now a new set of apps will let users say more about what they are doing, such as he or she ‘cooked’ a meal, ‘ran’ five miles or ‘danced’ to this or that tune.

Tomorrow in San Francisco, press will be shown a whole new generation of apps that developers have created to match Zuckerberg’s Open Graph vision.

Last September at F8, as he unveiled Facebook’s Timeline layout for the first time, Zuckerberg said that in creating the new Social Graph experience apps needed to be redesigned.

“Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected,” Zuckerberg said at F8 last September. “To help you map out all the things to be connected. In 2007, we introduced at the first F8 the concept of the Social Graph and last year we introduced the concept of the Open Graph, not only as a map of relationships and connections, but to add anything you want and connect by liking it.

“This time, we’re going to let you add anything you like and connect to an order of magnitude more things than before. Now you don’t have to ‘like’ a book, you can say you ‘read it’. Now you don’t have to like a movie, you can say you ‘watched it’.

“Before we added nouns so you could ‘like’ anything you wanted. This year we’re adding verbs.”

Facebook’s new Social Graph apps will be mobile in orientation

Speaking with Siliconrepublic.com at last year’s Dublin Web Summit, the director of Facebook’s Developer Network Ethan Beard said that Timeline’s apps will be more mobile than web.

“We think that a lot of the apps that are being built to help people build out their Timeline, some of those apps are more mobile apps than web apps,” Beard said.

He cited the example of the Nike Plus GPS integration that was demoed at F8, which shares a users’ various running exploits on Timeline via GPS on the users’ smartphone. “It’s a mobile app that works with a web app, but the primary use case is on mobile.

“Things that you do and activities that you take part in throughout your life, and when you want to share them and put them on Timeline, a lot of those will not be where you are sitting in front of a computer, but where you are travelling, cooking, running or hanging out with friends.”

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com