Facebook f8 - Social Graph and Connections API

I attended the Facebook F8 conference yesterday. Here are some takeways from the conference. The platform now offers some very compelling features for small business social engagement. Also, this could very well be the beginning of Facebook entering "Search".

Keynote Summary

• FB now has 400MM monthly unique visitors
• Reached 100MM mobile users in 3 years but has reached the same usage using FBConnect in 1 year – Connect is pretty powerful
• Policy update – They’ve removed the 24 hour limit on storing user data – you can now keep it forever
• Policy update – They are fully oAuth2.0 compliant, this simplifies the entire Single Sign on experience
• New Feature – Launched Graph API provides ability to read and write connections
• New Feature – Launched Social Plugins – like button, recommendations, activity, social bar
• New Feature – Single Currency  for gaming across multiple
• New Feature – Search – powerful search API  - e.g. http://graph.facebook.com/search?q=intuit+business+directory
• New Feature - Graph API – every object, connection and connections between objects can now be retrieved using a simple restful interface, e.g http://graph.facebook.com/nbandaru or http://graph.facebook.com/nbandaru/movies
• Docs.com – New Microsoft launch to coincide with the launch – uses some key features for ‘instant social connections’.

URLs

Open Graph Protocol - http://opengraphprotocol.org/
Facebook Insights/Analytics – http://facebook.com/insights
Keynote - http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/377
Social Plugins - http://developers.facebook.com/plugins

Open Social Plugins details

• For reading and writing
• plugins are like button, friends activity and recommendations
• Like Button – URLs become objects and you can provide meta data such as title, type, image, lat, long, street address etc... to associate with the URL ( see opengraphprotocol.org for details)
• FB thinks it’ll serve 1Billion “Likes” in 24 hours – offers a lot of meta data to search on and enable social recommendations
• Activity Plugin – This should be used to answer questions like “what’s most interesting social activity for this URL” - provides content that from other friends activities
• Recommendation Plugin – This could be used to answer questions like “what are the most interesting URLs on your site?”
• Facepile - shows profile pictures of the user's friends who have already signed up for your site.

Graph API details

• Simplicity is prime, it’s do over of existing API and fully RESTful -  full compliance with oAuth2.0 makes FBConnect very simple to implement
• Objects can be easily accessed in a browser – e.g. https://graph.facebook.com/vernal ( Vernal was the speaker for this session)
• 20+ different types of objects – people, pages, events, groups, photos
• Connections can be retrieved the same way – https://graph.facebook.com/vernal/friends – returns JSON array of all friends
• Connections between objects can be retrieved the same way  - http://graph.facebook.com/121213244/attending – returns all people attending an event ( with object id 121213244)
• Meta Data for a URL can be retrieved similarly – http://graph.facebook.com/121213244?metadata=1
• Search API - http://graph.facebook.com/search?q=intuit+business+directory – returns a JSON array

 

Comments

[Shrisha]

Nice Summary, Nagaraju