The first session at the Glue Conference was from Josh Edelman from the Facebook platform. Edelman waxed lyrical about the closeness he feels to everyone given the growing ubiquity of Facebook. It was more of a Facebook 101 talk than anything overly relevant to the event itself.
Connecting People
All the relationships that have been built up over time are different depending on context – family web relationships are different from vocational ones and social ones. It’s very nuanced. It’s all about the ability to reconnect with people who played a significant role in ones life historically. Over 35 year olds is the currently fastest growing demographic on Facebook. Family sharing is core to Facebook and with that comes the requirement to ensure sufficient levels of privacy are available.
Edelman contends that Facebook is a social contract – a trusting relationship between discreet parties.
He showed some statistics of Facebook updates during the Obama inauguration and used it as a contention that “we’re capturing what everyone is thinking and saying” – of course the point needs to be made that they were capturing only what engaged Facebook members were thinking and saying – there’s an important distinction between those two viewpoints.
The social stack
Identity – Friends – Share
Problem – too many signup forms. Identity federation (in this case Facebook Connect) allows users to avoid multiple signups. They want to be the centre of our digital universe (unfortunately they do down in Mountain View as well!)
Problem – having to create friend relationships in multiple places. Answer (anyone see a recurring theme here?): Facebook Connect for federation of friend relationships.
Increasing sharing everywhere
How to communicate information more effectively – it’s just too hard to share at the moment. Yet again we heard that Facebook Connect was the answer to this problem. The Facebook Open Stream API allows information to be streamed and consumed in different ways and in different places. The virtuous cycle of viewing and sharing – bringing that out into the entire web…
Ahhhh well – the problems of the world, and the web, are solved – onwards and upwards – with Facebook Connect we’re all going to be happier, healthier and better people.
