Recent Facebook Technologies
Analytics, called "Insights For Your Domain"
Track numbers of users, volume of content shared, site response time
This works the same for Pages on facebook and your own web content that implements the Open Graph Protocol, Doing this requires setting fb:admins or fb:app_id in your RDFa meta tags, You also need to tell facebook about your page
For pages, this means new and removed fans, as well as how many users are displaying publicly that they're your fans
You also get info on how many visitors your page got, how many of your stories they read, how many wall comments, and other interaction metrics
You can also access demographics data and referrer info
Detailed demographics of users and how they are sharing application
Doesn't compete with Google Analytics yet in detailed traditional analytics
Facebook credits
Payment system for facebook apps
You can earn credits through credit-card reward programs or other methods
Facebook has official help on this for end users
Open graph protocol
Lets people establish relationships with any page on the web
Lets you represent anything (restaurant, person, movie) with a page and tell facebook "this is that thing," the way you used to with facebook pages
Basically makes all pages potentially "facebook" pages
This means that you can publish activity stream updates from anywhere
The Open Graph protocol enables you to integrate your web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Once your pages become objects in the graph, users can establish connections to your pages as they do with Facebook Pages.
Powers the social plugins
Powered by RDFa
Gives pages semantics, so facebook can bucket them
Lets facebook connect content objects on disparate sites (e.g., bands on pandora and last.fm)
This is a big incentive for sites to encode real semantic-web data into their content, This is also a big step toward a web-wide recommendation engine
Social plugins
There's a handy JS API that lets you drop these in with a line of HTML
Like button
Any web page or object on a webpage can be "liked" and this is reported to your news feed
Makes it super easy to broadcast that you think something is cool to your friends
Has special added functionality for real-world objects that have been enhanced with the open graph API, "Your pages show up in more places on Facebook and you gain the ability to publish stream stories to connected users"
Automatically personalized for logged-in facebook users to see what their friends have liked
Activity Feed
Shows people what their friends are doing on your site
Recommendations tells people what else they should do on your site (probably powered by their friends)
Login with Faces
Shows users who of their friends already use your site and lets users login to your site
Gives your site added access to a user's personal information, By default, you get a user ID and their default personal info (name, profile pic, friends), You can request additional access to things like the user's photos or email address, but the user has to grant this, Uses OAuth 2.0 and can be done from either server or client side
Allows sites to authenticate users for single-signon purposes as well, This replaces facebook connect
Facepile
Shows people who of their friends already uses your site
Has a really bad name
Comments
Lets users comment on any of your content
Lets users share their comments to their own walls and thereby in their activity streams
Livestream
Lets people share and comment in realtime for live events
Like Box
Allows you to embed the activity stream from your Facebook page on your website
Lets users directly like your facebook page from your site
Instant Personalization
Lets sites access certain personal data about users without those users giving access through facebook connect
Allows sites to customize for users automatically
This has caused some backlash, according to RWW
This is partner-only currently
Social bar
Rests at the bottom of the browser
Lets users share and chat
A "kitchen sink" of user tools, Chat, Activity Stream, Likes
Code for this is available on GitHub
Not widely rolled out yet
This is probably another social plugin
Criticisms
Technology is only sorta-open
DataPortability.org has an excellent roundup of this
The metadata is encoded in an open-web, standards-friendly way (RDFa)
Protocol was released in an IP friendly way
The activities are sent through proprietary APIs and are stored entirely in facebook's closed database
Privacy-policy changes were handled in a way that scared users
Several Web industry leaders have very publicly left facebook over the privacy row
The new API keeps leaking private user information
Facebook leadership has been taking heat and having to respond in public about the changes
Vaporware competitors have been getting an unusual amount of buzz by claiming to create "privacy-centered" networks
Privacy Flaws are emerging in the API
According to the Guardian, it is possible to access private information about people's attendance of events through the graph API
Open Graph API
Allows developers to access data from facebook's graph
Friends
Pictures
Likes
Allows third-party sites to import user graph data
Lunch.com is using Facebook "like" data to enhance its recommendation engine
