Mark Zuckerberg, kicked off the conference — after a humourous introduction by Saturday Night Live star Andy Samberg — by introducing the “Timeline” page. This new feature will let people digitally map everything they’ve ever done.
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The new feature essentially allows users to turn their profile pages into interactive digital scrap books to tell the stories of their lives.
As Zuckerberg explained it represents, “The heart of your Facebook experience, completely rethought from the ground up… Timeline is the story of your life.”
“The biggest challenge was to tell the story of your life in a single page,” Zuckerberg said.
“What Timeline does is show all the recent activity and then as you go back in time it starts summarising the things you’ve done in your life.”
There was no definite date, beyond “[in] a few weeks,” put to the rolling out of Timeline to Facebook’s 8-million users.
Also announced at f8 was the opening up of “Open Graph applications” to the wider Facebook ecosystem.
These applications will, among other things, allow users to share and discover music, movies, books.
The widely expected launch of a music service, was also confirmed with Spotify as a partner.
Also heralded by Zuckerberg was the arrival of Facebook applications which will automatically share to chosen friends what users are doing or experiencing online without needing to click “Like” or “Share” buttons.
People will need to install third-party applications to share snippets in Timeline profile pages, which will feature privacy controls. Applications will also require people to set data sharing “permissions” before they are used.
