My new Facebook Timeline has arrived. After yesterday’s f8 announcement (great overview here) I really think we are about to see the ‘profound changes’ that mashable talked about yesterday morning.
Hacking Facebook to set up Timeline is a rather simple. Techcrunch has published a handy DIY guide this morning. But only I am currently able to see my timeline right now.
What it does is really to replace my profile with a nice, interactive biography on one page. The Timeline stops everytime Facebook identifies important steps in my life. My sister’s birth certainly was one of these events (even though at that point I didn’t necessarily agree). And I am invited to upload baby photos of her. Cheesy and nice.
Timeline is a new, pretty cool metaphor that really adds a new perspective to Facebook. Facebook as a lifelong diary – well actually…a living diary. Long term not just super-today.
But there is much more that I find interesting.
Timeline is just a new nice metaphor, a visual interface, maybe even a new USP for Facebook (“Life archive”). The one update that really changes a lot is Facebook’s future interaction with the Open Graph. Soon the system will allow more specific interactions with the bands/books/friends that you are interacting with today. Anyway, defining interactions through verb groups (basically a tagging feature for the like button) enables Facebook to become semantic and – thanks to its pure size – also define the semantic web.
Allfacebook.com has published a couple of examples on how this can look like in the future.
Sharing and interacting with the world outside will work differently: “There will essentially be two streams for each user, the stuff they overtly want to share, and the trail of their activities in real-time — essentially a type of life-casting automatically generated, an always on news stream requiring no direct effort on their part.”
What this all means? Definitely an oversharing explosion in the first place. But after the ‘new’ Facebook will have adjusted to its new realities it will have opened the gateways to the Web of Things. The rather abstract Open-Graph metaphor is a significant step in Facebook defining more than just positive or negative attitude towards digital things. Facebook wants to define a semantic world – and that’s not just a major leap.
One of the tools to and a much more granular ‘Like Button’ which is designed to define things beyond Facebook.
© Gerald Hensel for davaidavai.com, 2011. |
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Post tags: Diy, Facebook, Facebook Life, Facebook Timeline, Hacking Facebook, Open Graph, Semantic Web, social network, Social Networks, Timeline, usp
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