f8: a wakeup call for the open web

f8, Facebook's developer event was Weds, April 21st at the Design Center. Mark Zuckerberg and Bret Taylor, Director of Platform Product led off the opening keynote with 3 main announcements:

· Open Graph – combining the graphs of other companies with the Facebook Social Graph

· Social Plug-ins – 100,000 sites have already adopted, making other sites on the Web instantly social and spookily prescient

· Graph API – an elegant re-architecting of an existing API to take the burden/method proliferation off of developers, and major adopter of OAuth 2.0 open standard

My take on the opening keynote, Graph API session, Open Tech session and closing keynotes with links for more information if interested:

· Facebook’s overall positioning is they are ready to take on Google. This is a Big Deal. Feels like a watershed moment in the realpolitik relationships that make up the Web

· Old Web is about referring hyperlinks model; the new Web where “the default is Social” is about connections, putting people at the center of the Web.

· Open Graph = 75 content partners to connect Facebook’s social graph with the graphs from other verticals, such as Yelp (small business & restaurants graph), IMDB (movie graph), CNN (news graph), ESPN (sports graph), integrating and making their sites instantly social, and pointing people off of Facebook.com’s news feed to external sites for the first time

· Graph API (“all you need is a Web browser and cURL, don’t have to wade through 2000 lines of PHP code”) will replace the old, complicated, method-proliferating API

· No more 24-hour cache policy limit, to make use of Real-time Updates, a callback url so developers don't have to poll constantly to catch user updates for their apps and Facebook platform doesn’t get slammed with unnecessary API calls

· Graph API Real-time Updates will use a push alert, WebHook concept, but did not adopt the open standard PubSubHubBub proposed by Google

· Facebook has been on the defensive from open standards leaders who are not sure that Facebook's version of open meets the developer definition of Open:

· Could end up being a huge step forward for the Semantic Web vision, a la Microformats:

· Facebook Connect API (100 Million users) eventually going away, but will continue to be supported for now

· Google is the new “evil empire” to be feared, running into the arms of Microsoft, who is less of a perceived threat: