WPP (parent company of Ogilvy PR and our 360 Digital Influence Team) has been sponsoring a series of technology partnership meetings called “Co-Labs” which are aimed at connecting digital teams to discuss the latest advances in web technologies. I made the trip up to NYC last Thursday to hear from Justin Osofsky, head of the Facebook Developer Network. On a side-note at the Starbucks across the street I ran into the T-1000. I love this town.
The Challenge
Justin has been with Facebook for the last 2.5 years and was a driving force behind Facebook Connect. He started out with some stats: in the two months since F8 there are 350 thousand sites using the new Social Graph plugins and there have been over 100 million “Likes.” One more stat relevant to the small crowd of tech people in the room: with a little over 1,400 Facebook employees and over 400 million active users, there’s about one Facebook developer per 1 million users. Then Justin throws out a challenge: the best way to push the Social Graph plugins and Facebook Connect is by developers creating engaging experiences.
Justin points to CNN and Univision for good uses of the Social Graph plugins. Once connected, users can see how their friends are engaging with the site. Simply Hired (see the companies your friends work for) and Trip Advisor (get travel advice from your friends) have both just launched good uses of Facebook Connect. It’s these integrations that will lead a personalized web driven by people and customized for each user.
The Developer Wishlist
This opens the floor to discuss some frustrations from the development community. The documentation needs work. There’s a disappointment in moving away from the interactive developer Wiki to the incomplete developer Docs. Developers would like more heads-up before changes are deployed; what functions are being deprecated? How is the API changing? Justin took notes and promises to share with his team. High on the developer wishlist is a channel to connect with Facebook directly. The people in the room are willing to pay for this type of service, but it’s unlikely to happen anytime in the foreseeable future.
What’s Next?
A peek at what may or may not be going on behind the curtain reveals the possibility of “Like” through SMS short-codes (being experimented with currently), physical location based “Like,” and more robust Insights through aggregate data.
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