So Chirp, the Twitter conference, was last week, with their big announcements about the future of the platform. This past week, not to be outdone, Facebook’s F8 conference has been going on. Here’s the latest.
Now, I will fully admit (and you know this already) that I detest Facebook and all this stuff makes my brain hurt – so I won’t try and summarize – but better to hear it all from the peeps who were there, anyway. Dig into these at your leisure. There are a lot of links here, don’t feel you need to read them all unless you’re especially into this stuff. 
Here are some links about their specific announcements:
Live Coverage Of Facebook’s f8 Developer Event (All Facebook) – no longer live, obviously, but this is an easy-to-read summary of Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote.
Building the Social Web Together (Facebook Blog) – this is Zuckerberg’s own watered-down-for-FB-users blog post version.
Facebook: What They Announced At F8 (TheNextWeb) – this is the clearest summary of the announcements I’ve seen so far; if you just want to read one link, make it this one.
More on…
Open Graph – With the Open Graph Protocol, Any URL Can Be Treated Just Like a Facebook Page (Inside Facebook)
Virtual Currency – Facebook Consolidates Its Virtual Currency with Facebook Credits(ReadWriteWeb)
Insights – Facebook Insights: Taking Web Analytics to the Next Level (ReadWriteWeb)
Docs.com –Microsoft Taps Into Facebook’s Open Graph To Launch Docs.com
Social Plugins – Facebook Opens Up Social Tools To Broader Web
And.. no-one’s quite sure if all of this is good or bad for the future of the internet – but everyone agrees it’s a pretty big deal.
According to this post, “Facebook is only concerned about two things. Amassing the biggest profile database in the world and convert[ing] that into a sickening amount of money. Today’s announcements were just the opening salvo on their march to integrate themselves so deeply in the web that we can’t do without them.”
- Facebook Data & Privacy: So Much Has Changed in Two Years (ReadWriteWeb) Zuckerberg’s changing attitude towards privacy.
- Facebook Is Now The Infrastructure For A Social Real-Time Web (RegularGeek)
- First Take Analysis: Facebook’s Crusade of Colonization (Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang)
- Facebook Opens Up to the Web – Is that Good or Bad? (GigaOm)
- Is the New Facebook a Deal With the Devil? (ReadWriteWeb)
My take? As says Yoda: “Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you.” I don’t really know what all of this means for associations, (and apologies for the mixed metaphors), but I know we need to be paying attention before we wake up one day to find ourselves deep in the Matrix, hooked up to tubes with the machine world sucking out our brains.
