F8 Keynote: Our Way Or The Highway

Mark Zuckerberg and fellow Facebook exec Ben Ling took the stage and didn't announce anything revolutionary, but the message was clear:

Facebook has a clear vision for what they want the platform and the network to be, and developers better quickly fall in line.

As far as announcements go, we heard everything we knew we'd hear -- the winners of the fbFund grants, the launch of Facebook Connect, a walkthrough of the new design.

One new nugget -- there will be a new developer challenge. A total of $2 million will be handed out to developers via 25 $25,000 awards and finalists will get $250,000 awards. The finalists will be voted on by Facebook users.

Q/A:

Q: Looking forward to seeing a payments platform? When might that happen.

A: I wish I knew.

Q: Anyway that the new platform and Friend Connect will work with Microsoft Mesh?

A: Nothing specific announcing.

Q: Been hearing that some applications like Slide's Top Friends have been punished for things that other apps have done.

A: The way the enforcement process works is not just based on an isolated incident, so it's based on a track record of responsiveness. For the Great Apps, it's not a specific points system.

Q: Copycats in other countries.

A: There are different ways that we will work with companies across the world. But if someone's blatantly ripping us off, that's what we want to make sure doesn't happen.

Q: How will you integrate the iPhone? When will it be available?

A: It will be a Coco framework. Will be available in the fall.

Q: How does Facebook make money?

A: For the next few years, our primary focus is helping people share information and growing the user base. Figuring out how we monetize is going to be another thing that we work on but that's kind of the second thing we work on.

Q: What does Facebook evolve into when you realize this vision?

A: We think that we're building some of the key components of the ecosystem. The feeds structure is a valuable tool for people. Different communication applications.

Q: Joining OpenSocial?

A: Nothing to announce today. We're all pushing the Web forward.

Q: Plans to take a cut of the virtual goods traffic?

A: Not something we'v enever figured out yet. All the questions about monetization -- we haven't figured out the optimal way and we're exploring a number of things.

Q: When will see the Pages' design change?

A: We just have this effort to now go update all the pages. There are some things that are going to be constantly evolving.

Q: Search on Facebook?

A: It definitely needs to get better, we have some ideas. But we're not close to launching it.

Q: Great Apps.

A: We're expecting within the next year or so maybe a dozen or 15.

Q: What's the future with Connect and desktop applications, mobile applications, is it more than just Web apps?

A: It's web apps, desktop apps, mobile apps. We don't have anything (specific) to announce again.

See our preview coverage here.

4:32: No sign of him yet, but people are still filing in, should be any minute now.

4:35: He's on stage to Weezer's Say It Ain't So.

4:36: Last year we started a movement. We've made a lot of mistakes and there's a lot we've had to learn.

4:36: It's important for us (app devs and Facebook) to take a step back. Decide whether what we're doing is for real value.

4:37: Very deeply held purpose. 6 months ago we tried to articulate it to a mission. It wasn’t until a few months is. I was off traveling through Istanbul, got a chance to clear my mind. Got to really focus on the exchange and the sharing going on. I really want us to build a product that allows you to really feel a person.

4:39: Most important and interesting information comes from people. It’s not out there ready to be indexed. It’s only available if the people who have it choose to share it. Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share in order to make the world more open and connected.

4:41: Making the world more open and connected is more than any single organization can do. We want the community to be aligned with us. A lot of the discussion today is going to be how we can do that.

4:41: We had no clue how far the idea (for the platform) would go. The last year has been pretty crazy. A lot of developers and people all over the world are joining this movement.

4:41: Resu;ts: At last year's f8 there were 24 million people using Facebook. Today we're already at 90 million people on Facebook and a lot of them are coming to use all the applications. A lot of this growth has been from outside the United States. Last year we were around 50-50 (US-International). Over this year, the international growth has been larger -- now more than 2/3s international. One guy in Greenland (big applause).

4:44: Canada is most penetrated country. Almost 40% of people in Canada are on Facebook. For translating, we made it so any person on Facebook could offer a translation and users could vote on those translation. Translated to Spanish within 2 weeks, French in less than 24 hrs.

4:44: First announcement: Opening up the translation tool so applications can use the same tool to translate their apps.

4:45: More than 400,000 developers. More than half are outside the U.S. Done "developer garages" all around the world. There are four developer garages happening simultaneously.

4:47: iLike and MySpace Music. The top 5,000 bands have more fans on iLike than on any other fans. Causes’ “Stop Global Warming” has more than Al Gore’s Alliance (now the two have merged).

4:48: Flixster raised $6M, Zynga raised $29M, Living Social raised $5M this week.

4:49: So far he's mentioned five developers by name -- Causes, iLike, Flixster, Zynga, Living Social.

4:51: We’re trying to see how sharing happens in the real world and map out and bring as accurate of a model as possible so all of the apps can use it to grow successfully.

4:51: Feeds are really powerful because they always surface the most recent and relevant information going on. That drives a lot of traffic and views to the most recent content in the system. "Virtuous Cycle of Sharing"

4:51: Most powerful feed is News Feed. The day that we launched News Feed, pretty shortly after, traffic went up by 50%. The amount of content people were making also increased.

4:53: iLike: One of the ways people were sharing information through iLike was through feeds. Within four days of launching the platform, more than a million people had already used and tried out iLike. One of the things that we’re going to be talking about is a new kind of feed. (coming later)

4:54: Also learned a lot this year. When we first released the platform we just tried to get it out there as quickly as possible. As happy as I am with the growth over the past year, there were a lot of mistakes. We need to work more closely with developers so they’re building things that will help people actually share instead of just spreading virally.

4:56: Profile boxes produced a lot of clutter. We need to build a more simple and elegant solution that will enable sharing. We’ve been working with a number of developers to evolve Facebook. Three goals: Give people more power tools to share, reward apps that help people share, simplifiy the site.

4:56: Walking through the new design: Core is a new kind of feed called the Wall. These feeds are a great way to incentivize developers to build apps that are more engaging and help people share information.

4:54: We haven't done enough to reward the good citizens of the ecosystem or punish the bad ones.

4:56: Profile boxes produced a lot of clutter. We need to build a more simple and elegant solution that will enable sharing. We’ve been working with a number of developers to evolve Facebook. Three goals: Give people more power tools to share, reward apps that help people share, simplifiy the site.

4:58: The Wall will give you more control over how you want to display your stories.

5:01: We haven't completely got rid of the concept of boxes. For people who want to keep boxes around, we've added a "Boxes tab." There are also ways to add new tabs for different applications.

5:01: This was just a monumental amount of work to get all of this in good shape. It's a pretty small team working on it. On Saturday the managers of the different groups were just sitting in a room to figure out what we have to do finish this redesign. And we started coding. And they watched the Bill O'Reilly YouTube video when he flipped out on Inside Edition. (He showed the video to all of us).

5:05: Live demo of the new profie: Showing the new homepage. Now that we’ve gotten rid of the concept of “adding an applications” it also lifts the restriction of only people who added the application can get stories in their feed from users who have the app. For example, he has a story in his feed of a book review made in Virtual Bookshelf. But he can see it even though he’s never touched Virtual Bookshelf.

5:06: Side note: The crowd has been pretty subdued so far, but maybe that's because nothing earth shattering has been launched.

5:08: Demo over. That's the first demo that we've ever had work pretty well.

5:08: That's what we've done inside of Facebook, but more of the world is outside of Facebook than inside of Facebook. But we're going to see the various social networks start to decentralize. The first step of this was the platform introduced last year at f8. The next step is that things are going to decentralize further so that the applications don't have to run inside of Facebook. I think we're at the beginning of a movement.

5:10: Like the beginning of the PC area, when things decentralized from Apple building teh whole stack to Intel building the chip, MSFT building the software, and Dell selling the computer. That's what's going on now. Less of this movement is going to be about Facebook.com and more of it will be about the applications allowing people to share.

5:11: Facebook Connect: Enable developers to build all the same applications that they can inside of Facebook across the Web. Make it so people could use their information anywhere that they want. Make it so people always have control of their information.

5:16: Still walking through Facebook Connect. Making sure that people have complete control over the information that they share. We also want to make it as easy as possible to develop applications on the rest of the Web.

5:16: Demo of Facebook Connect from Digg. Enable people to easily and quickly find and share interesting content from around the Web. All of the 90 million Facebook users are going to be able to join the Digg army with one click of a button.

5:19: Don’t have to register for a Digg account, you can authenticate directly in Digg with your Facebook login. Once you’ve connected to Digg through Facebook Connect, all of your Diggs are posted on your Facebook profile.

5:20: Six Apart: Commenting on blogs, still have the same “name, e-mail address and Web site.” Integrate Facebook Connect Authentication on Moveable Type. Your security settings on Facebook are automatically ported to Moveable Type. It also puts light blue boxes around your Facebook friends who've commented. This took us about a day and a half to implement.

5:21: CitySearch: CitySearch has been helping people find popular places and new businesses for quite a while now. We're going to be launching a new site, and sharing information is a big part of the puzzle. When you look for a restaurant or a hotel or a spa the most important thing is trusted content. CitySearch has editorial reviews, user reviews, etc., but what could be more helpful and more trusted than user reviews from your friends?

5:24: Again, take your Facebook identity to log in to CitySearch, and you can click on a “My Friends’ Reviews” tabs, and see places your Facebook friends have reviewed. When you review places, you can publish it on CitySearch and on your Facebook feed.

5:26: Zuckerberg back. Couple of big evolutions – the evolution of the site itself, and the second is Facebook Connect, helping people build the apps outside of Facebook that they can build inside. Profile launched Monday. Facebook Connect developer keys will be available starting today.

5:26: Next year I hope that we'll be able to point to a good number of really meaningful social apps both inside and outside of Facebook.

5:27: Zuckeberg off the stage.

5:31: Director of Platform Program Management, Ben Ling: Rich thriving ecosystem. There is over $200 million that’s invested in Facebook application companies. 13 different ad networks. Stanford, Berkeley, MIT Harvard have all taught courses on developing on the Facebook platform.

5:33: Guiding principles for great applications: Meaningful, Trustworthy, Well-Designed.

5:33: Meaningful:

• Social (Lil Green Patch as an example) applications should leverage the social graph.
• UsefuL: Solving real user problems, addressing real user needs (Carpool application as an example). A fifth of Cornell's students use the Carpool application. Addresses a real user need.
• Expressive: About sharing and expressing yourself (Graffiti app). Graffiti app has partnered with brands like Dell and BMW where users can submit their drawings
• Engaging: Apps that sustain user interest (Playfish). Facebook users using Playfish applications have played 900 million minutes of Playfish games in the last month (1800 years).

5:37: Trustworthy: It's important to maintain a safe and trusted ecosystem.

• Secure: Privacy settings, who do I want to share information with? Who don't I want to?
• Respectful: Being respectful of users information and time. When I add application Idont want to have to add 20 of my friends, or accidentally send a notification to 20 friends without my knowledge (light applause).
• Transparent: Being transparent about what the application does and its features.

5:39: Well Designed:

• Clean
• Fast: Applications shouldn't take a long time to load. As the site gets faster, users use Facebook more. It's important for all applications to be fast.
• Robust: The application should be available to users when and where they want it. Scaling from 5 to 5 million.

2:41: There's been a lot of challenges over the last year. One of the key things that we're doing, we're focusing on partnering more closely with developers. Incorporating your (developers') feedback into our product development cycle.

2:42: Staffing up a full-time partner management and community management organization.

2:43: Keep ecosystem safe for users and fair for developers. Last year we took a pretty hands off approach. Distribution became overwhelming, so we restricted the communication channels. Going forward we're going to be focusing on new programs that help the ecosystem safe and fair.

2:45: Facebook will be taking an active part in communicating on the Wikis and the forums.

2:45: fbFund grant recipients: Challenge, Connected Weddings, Podclass, Mylisto. Trazzler, Zimride (there are more but I couldn't get them all typed).

2:43: We need to help the developers create useful apps.

2:44: For new developers -- we'll provide you with tools and partnerships, program in the languages that you're used to. New and improved developer Web site launching.

2:47: New competition: Submit apps, Facebook selects 25 semi finalists who get $25K, users vote on finalists who get $250K. Total of $2 million.

2:48: Two new programs, verification program: Facebook will verify applications so users will be able to see which ones have got the stamp of verification from Facebook.

2:49: Facebook Great Apps program. All the principles are embodied, and they advance the mission of Facebook. The apps will be more integrated -- like native Facebook apps, and more content. Two inagural partners -- iLike and Causes (no surprises here).

5:51: iLike today is offering free streaming of all music.

5:51: We need to have a relatively robust enforcement system to get rid of apps that don't agree with Facebook's mission or have alterior agenda. We take the takedowns of applications very seriously because they ruin users' trust.

5:54: Communicating principles better, and enforcing based on the principles. It’s impossible to write all possible ways that an application is deceptive. We’re also going to make efforts to make the process more transparent. The last piece is consistent implementation – the same process is applied to large and small applications.

5:55: Again walking through Facebook Connect. It will be available for Desktop and Mobile.

5:55: Facebook Connect for the iPhone -- access Facebook apps on your iPhone.

5:56: As part of Facebook Connect, like to take a moment to talk about the OpenWeb Foundation. We've open sourced our platform and participated in the data portability. Facebook will be supporting the OpenWeb foundation which will be announced tomorrow.

5:57: The Facebook Hackathon (build an app in 8 hours) starts now.

5:58: Keynote over.