New Facebook: Run down of the most influential opinions

Last week Faceboook introduced some of the most significant changes to its platform since its launch in 2007. The revamp has affected pretty much every area of Facebook from user profiles to the open graph API. In fact lots of people are still talking about the changes. We have collated some of the most influential online opinions into one easily digestible post to give you a run down of the changes and a sense of its impact.

Facebook’s Bid to Reinvent Music, News and Everything by Steven Levy, Wired

The biggest shift, and what may be the most controversial, centers on the Facebook profile. It not only will look different — a large cover picture (users pick it) makes it look more like a stylish website than the bland resume of the original — but it serves a much deeper function.

The new model is a “foundational narrative timeline.” In a sense, Facebook is letting you write your autobiography in real time. With a huge new source of personal information, Facebook can now serve some of most micro-targeted ads in history. You could probably call them nano-targeted ads. Read the article

Spotify Gains 1 Million New Facebook Users In A Week by Josh Constine, Inside Facebook

Spotify has gained one million new monthly active Facebook-integrated users since f8 [a week ago] to reach 4.4 million MAU. It spiked from 1.12 million to 3.25 million daily active users the day after f8, and appears to be settling back to roughly a quarter million new DAU. Rdio, MOG, and Deezer have also seen significant gains in their numbers of Facebook-integrated users.Read the article

The algorithm is the key to success by Rafe Needleman, CNET

The algorithm is a big part of today's announcement at the F8 developers' conference. The algorithm can determine what you're likely to like based on who you like, what you do, where you go, which apps you use (and how), and so forth--all of which is information that Facebook will now collect through its own service and all the apps that are being built to run on it.Read the article

New Facebook Timeline Is All About Discovery And Explosive Revenue Growth by E.B. Boyd, Fast Company

The new features are allowing users to consume more things in Facebook. Instead of sending users to outside websites, the features can allow users to read, watch, or listen to content right inside of Facebook itself.

Facebook is also opening the door to a series of lifestyle apps, like the Nike+ run tracker or Foodspotting, which will similarly automatically log any activity a user takes in their app directly back into Facebook. Read the article

No More Share Buttons, MG Siegler, Tech Crunch

With the new Open Graph, you’re sharing stuff as you do it. You don’t have to think about it. You’re listening to music on Spotify and it’s being shared with your friends automatically in the Facebook Ticker. The only button you hit is “play”.

The idea of hitting a share button to push your favorite song to Facebook is stupid. Enjoy the music, don’t worry about having to remember to share it. That’s how this should work. Read the article

New Analytics by Greg Finn, Search Engine Land

Facebook announced “Graph Rank,” a system that manages the discovery of Open Graph activity. This will help to show more engaging content to users while helping app users make better apps. To optimize for Graph Rank, better Open Graph analytics will be shown to app developers: By using this information, developers will be able to optimize an app’s Graph Rank to create more engagement.Read the article

What the changes mean to Google & Twitter by Mathew Ingram, gigot

The risk for Google, as we’ve described before, is that through these new services and features, Facebook starts to accumulate an even larger body of data about the activity of those 800 million people — and about their desires as well, since the network is expected to launch a “want” button soon. That is gold for an entity like Google, not only because those signals are important for search but because they are increasingly important for advertising. And there is virtually no chance that Facebook is ever going to share any of that information with Google, or provide it in a form that allows for easy scraping.

And what about Twitter? As I’ve argued in other posts, I think Twitter is playing a different game — one that Facebook may be trying to get into with some of its changes, but isn’t well-suited for. In a nutshell, Twitter isn’t a social network at all, and never really has been. It allows for social behavior around information, but it is not in any sense a one-size-fits-all social destination with timelines and social apps and games, and all the other things Facebook (and Google) want to offer. It’s designed to do one thing well: short bursts of information, like a real-time social newswire. And it can target users based on that. Read the article