At today’s F8 developer’s conference Facebook announced their newest iteration of the facebook platform. Called Timeline, it’s a dramatic change from the facebook of current day. It draws upon their strengths and shows that they are very good at listening to the market. My thoughts on how it’ll change the social media landscape:
Identity – the newest battleground for social media
When you see timeline, from a consumer perpsective, you immediately notice how the infinite scroll format is much like posterous, or other blog oriented platforms. The difference is that because all of the assets on your facebook page are your own, personal assets, this page does indeed resemble who you are. Online. So it makes sense as Google takes alot of heat for demanding “real names” from it’s users, and other startups create “about me” plays encouraging users to customize and curate on their pages what their online “face” looks like, that Facebook has leveraged their defacto leading status as the leading U.S. based social network, to make it easier to represent who you are, online.
On other social networks your identity is based primarily on “what you say” or “what you do” – but often not both of these things are very well integrated. Facebook timeline will be the mega play at representing both actions and thoughts for each individual facebook user out there.
Things are Speeding up in the Social World
It’s interesting to note the rapid pace of improvements that has happened at Facebook in the last 2 months. Privacy and sharing improvements that users have been wailing for for years have finally been implemented. Timeline’s magazine style layout introduces a more personal, almost “My Space” customization ability (but not quite so liberal). Again, this freedom for expression is something that users have asked for and Facebook’s been critiqued for not implementing. Yet we’re seeing it roll out in just a few short weeks after Google+ hit the net. Not to mention minor tweaks like Facebook’s increase in the character limit to compete with Google’s.
The great part of all these indications is that now that there are competitors to Facebook that are lean & nimble, it increases the competition in the space and this means a better experience for social media users all over the world. The options for expressing oneself through social media is increasing at an almost extreme pace, and it means that companies will be watching each other very closely to see where this evolution is heading. For us as users, this can only be a good thing.
Verbs as Monetization
I have to wonder when Facebook will really sink their teeth into the brand money that’s out there, and I got a glimpse at the next step. Though I hadn’t thought much about the vocabulary used on Facebook before, they emphasized that they’d only really used nouns before “Luis liked Stevie Wonder” (proper noun). Forthcoming, Facebook will make verbs accessible on the platform. So sentences like “Luis hiked at Diamond Back Trail” will start appearing, thus linking action with a thing – which ostensibly could be a brand name. Right now, the open graph concept allows all developers to use the verb / noun construct however they want – but requires developers to wait while they review and approve submissions. It follows that this would be a perfect monetization strategy for Facebook, charging a premium for brands to list their app’s activity under certain verbs. I don’t think they’re doing this currently, but it would make sense as part of a larger monetization strategy around timeline.
I would love to “own” a verb.
