What Facebook’s New Timeline & Open Graph Beta Means for your Brand

Credit: Facebook

Today at Facebook’s annual f8 conference, the social network giant announced game-changing modifications to the ways in which Facebook user data is served up and curated. “Timeline” is a total re-approach to the profile while the new beta version of Facebook’s Open Graph protocol provides for social application development never before seen on such a massive level.

Timeline offers users the ability to curate their life’s data all in a thoroughly manageably chronology, including simple inclusion and exclusion settings in addition to a beautiful new presentation.

Facebook’s Open Graph Beta will provide some fascinating new ways for users to connect with the brands they know and trust, offering great new opportunities for future digital commerce.

Open Graph Beta: An Exciting New Opportunity for Facebook Application Development & Your Business

As a part of the growing Social Web, Facebook’s Open Graph Beta will offer a social experience alongside many online activities previously unexposed to this type of interaction on a massive level.

Where Facebook’s Open Graph protocol previously allowed for simple sharing such as easy additions to the Likes and Interests section of a user’s profile, or the posting of an interesting article on a user’s wall, the new beta version will now enable brands to become much more engaged in the conversation surrounding their products and services.

Exciting new abilities, for example, include the chance to listen and view music and multimedia such as movies alongside friends at the exact moment they’re interacting with the content. Want to watch the latest episode of Glee with your friends? Facebook will now offer you that experience.

What Do the Changes Announced at f8 Mean for My Digital Presence?

These exciting and newly available social feature sets provide users with the ability to curate nearly any type of data all on one platform. These developments most obviously mean great opportunities for increased digital commerce as the web continues to grow more social.

For small businesses and blogs, these developments mean that the comprehensive incorporation of Facebook into your users’ interaction with your brand must now become a complete conversation. Owners of all sorts of online presences should be working with digital startegy agencies now to begin to formulate how their companies may best take advantage of the introduction of both Timeline and Open Graph Beta.

Through a system of incorporation of both actions and objects into the Facebook profile experience, this new social experience will allow brands to create elements in a user’s Timeline or profile that are more prominently displayed throughout the user experience. Ultimately, this ability will allow brands to become a key part of their users’ and their friends’ experiences on Facebook:

The Open Graph allows apps to model user activities based on actions and objects. A running app may define the ability to “run” (action) a “route” (object). A reading app may define the ability to “read” (action) a “book” (object). A recipe app may define the ability to “cook” (action) to a “recipe” (object). Actions are verbs that users perform in your app. Objects define nouns that the actions apply to. We created sets of actions and objects for common use cases and a tool for you to create your own custom actions and objects. As users engage with your app, social activities are published to Facebook which connects the user with your objects, via the action.

With the Open Graph, your app becomes a part of the user’s identity and social graph. Through a single API, you’re able to deeply integrate into the key points of distribution on Facebook: Timeline, App Views, News Feed, and Ticker. As users interact with your app, actions are displayed on the users’ Timeline and their friends’ News Feeds and Tickers. With the Open Graph, you’ll be able to create a deep, persistent connection between you and your users, and drive new users to your app.

Take a look at Facebook’s initial page detailing Open Graph Beta here.

The widely popular music listening service Spotify has already released a video detailing the ways in which they’ll be using the new Open Graph Beta to expand their services into the conversations of their users. But more exciting is the fact that these capabilities, and what you see here, will also be available to large corporations and small businesses alike.