Today marks the six-year anniversary of the Facebook Platform, something that has been defining for Facebook as a company and already influenced a number of industries.

Now, Facebook is making its next big moves for the platform by introducing app services — new tools for developers that make it easier to build applications that span different devices and put users at the forefront. This is seen most clearly with the acquisition of Parse, a mobile backend as a service company, which will continue as a separate brand with a freemium services model for the time being. Facebook also recently hired the team behind Spaceport, a cross-platform development framework, and stealth software startup Osmeta, which was reportedly working on something related to enabling simpler development across devices.

“We’ve been thinking about how we can provide tools to developers to enable a more cross-platform world,” Facebook Director of Developer Products Doug Purdy said at a media “whiteboard” session Thursday. “We’re trying to create a platform that developers can build something that spans over devices and makes people the center. Regardless of the device that you or your friends are on, everyone can have a rich experience.”
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Facebook has created a new way for businesses and developers to target ads to users who have taken an action on Facebook or in an app within a more specific time range.

Using the “action spec” targeting capability, which allows advertisers to reach users by the actions they take in Open Graph apps and on Facebook directly, an advertiser could designate a time range shorter than 14 days. The default is still 14 days, but previously there was no option to set a shorter window.

This change gives advertisers more accuracy in reaching the most relevant users for a particular message. For instance, a local business might want to reach users who checked into their store within the past week. A developer might want to target users who installed their app in the past three days. A page owner might want to retarget users who viewed one of their page tabs the day before.

Action spec targeting is still a beta feature limited to advertisers working with Preferred Marketing Developers with the Ads API, so it isn’t widely known or understood. However, the feature offers developers unique opportunities to reach users who have taken specific in-app actions, including in their competitor’s apps. It also gives brands ways to segment and target their fans by the actions they take on their page or a competitor’s page.

Action spec targeting is also interesting in that advertisers can define a “negative action spec,” meaning users who have not taken a particular action. For example, a developer could reach users who have played a game, but not made an in-app purchase in the last 10 days. Advertisers can also reach friends of users who have taken a particular action.

More technical information about action spec targeting, including targeting by app activity in a time range is available here. A list of Facebook actions that advertisers can target against using action specs is available here. Businesses that are interested in this type of targeting should seek out an ads-qualified PMD.

In the first half of 2013, Facebook has made a number of moves to improve its platform for entertainment and lifestyle applications.

New Timeline sections give users a place to save and display their favorite books, movies, TV shows and music. Developers can use new common Open Graph actions like “want to watch” and “want to read.” Users can share what they’re listening to, eating, feeling and more through structured status updates. Graph Search lets them find content and recommendations through friends and others. And a deal with Rovi gives Facebook a detailed database of information about movies, TV shows and celebrities

We spoke to Facebook Manager, Strategic Partnerships Ime Archibong about the new opportunities for entertainment apps on the platform, Facebook’s expanding role in content discovery, and how Open Graph can represent our offline activities and memories. The following is an edited transcript from that interview.

Inside Facebook: So it seems like a good time to talk to you now with the the new Timeline sections, News Feed and Graph Search all launched. Let’s start by talking about the state of Facebook’s entertainment platform.

Ime Archibong: I’m really excited about the suite of assets that are available for apps right now, in the entertainment space particularly and in the music space, which is one of the things I’m most excited about. You have things that are great for users. Take sections in the Timeline redesign that came out. Users now have a home for where their music consumption goes, and I’m pretty excited about that.

News Feed continues to be an important piece of distribution property for apps. With the redesign and the prominence of the music section coming out, that’s another huge asset. Graph Search. I think we’re still a ways away from where we’re going to go with Graph Search, but there’s no mystery that Open Graph actions will be showing up in Graph Search at some point, and that’s going to be a good source of traffic for these entertainment apps.

And I like what we’re doing in mobile right now. The new pages redesign is slick, it’s user-centric. If you think of that as a music artist’s home base in the Facebook ecosystem, and as we make it more engaging for users, it’s a good piece of real estate for artists themselves. I look at all these assets starting to stack up and how they come together and make us a meaningful distribution platform for these apps.
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Facebook today announced a number of changes meant to improve the experience and increase the possibilities for mobile developers building apps that integrate with the social network. This includes new Open Graph APIs, a standard mobile share dialog, faster login and a Technology Partners program to help developers find third-party solutions that suit their needs.

One of the most significant developments announced today is the Object API, which allows mobile developers to create Open Graph objects without having to host corresponding webpages. Previously, applications had to serve data into Open Graph through web endpoints, so native iOS and Android apps weren’t able to build the same types of experiences or gain the same opportunities for distribution and discovery as web-basedd apps, unless they have the resources to build a web backend. Now this won’t be necessary and mobile or web apps can use the Object API for easier object creation.

Facebook is also introducing an object privacy model to allow objects that have custom or non-public privacy settings. This is especially important for some of the user generated content that comes from mobile apps. Web-hosted objects, on the other hand, have always had to be public. To help developers manage all their objects now, Facebook created a new “object browser” interface — seen below — that aims to organize developers’ objects in a more visual and intuitive way.

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Facebook today announced some changes to make it easier for developers to add Open Graph actions to their apps, including making it possible for apps to publish common actions without any configuration.

Facebook made it so that actions such as read, watch, listen and run — known as “common” or “built-in” actions — can be implemented directly using code it provides. Developers no longer have to configure these actions in the platform’s Open Graph tools. Developers can simply choose the action they want to include and the SDK their app uses, and Facebook will generate the appropriate code in the API reference section of its developer site. However, all app actions, including common ones, will need to be reviewed and approved by Facebook before going live.

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With the new Timeline, Facebook users can share richer stories about the books, movies, TV shows and music in their lives.

The social network is beginning to get to the vision it set out at the expansion of Open Graph in 2011. Users don’t have to Like a book, they can read it. Similarly, they can watch a movie or listen to an artist. The latest profile redesign helps users list what they’ve read, watched or listened to, but also what they want to read, watch and listen to.

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a number of new ways Facebook is helping users fill out these sections of their About page, including through desktop News Feed stories and Timeline modules. Now we’ve seen options on mobile, too. In the past, it hasn’t been very easy for users to update their profiles from mobile besides Liking things in the feed. Now, it’s easier to add a range of new information just by browsing News Feed and tapping a few buttons.

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Zuckerberg tops list of highest rated CEOs - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the No. 1 highest rated CEO, according to employee reviews on the career community site Glassdoor. Employees are asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way your CEO is leading the company?” Zuckerberg has a 99 percent approval rating. Apple CEO Tim Cook, who took the top spot last year, came in at No. 18 with 93 percent approval.

Zuckerberg supports immigration reform in letter to Obama - Zuckerberg was one of more than 100 executives of major tech companies and trade associations who signed a letter to the president and Congress this week calling for immigration reform to increase the number of highly skilled workers in the U.S. Specifically, the executives are asking for the quotas and categories for high-skilled nonimmigrant and immigrant visas to be more responsive to market needs and for spouses and children to not be included in those caps.

Users take 1B Open Graph actions daily – Facebook announced this week at SXSW that more than 400 billion Open Graph actions have been shared back to the social network since apps began integrating them in fall 2011. Of that, more than 110 million songs, albums and radio stations have been played 40 billion times via Facebook-integrated apps and 1.47 million books have been shared. The company says 1 billion Open Graph stories are shared daily.
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Facebook today announced new ways for lifestyle apps to tap into Open Graph with verbs:  run, walk, bike, rate, quote, want to read and want to watch.

These will be known as “built-in” or “common” actions, making them similar to how read, watch and listen can be incorporated into third-party applications. Although developers have been able to create their own custom actions with Open Graph, built-in actions help Facebook better understand the relationship between objects so that it can properly organize them in News Feed, Timeline aggregations and eventually search.

For example, if three of a user’s friends rate the same movie, Facebook can group those actions into a single News Feed story. Those stories can also include elements like star ratings or a fitness app could show stats from a user’s workout. Facebook says these features have improved the clickthrough rates for developers who have been testing them, such as Rotten Tomatoes and MapMyFitness. Other apps that have already added these actions include Nike, Runkeeper, GoodReads, Hulu and more. (more…)

Facebook is testing new built-in Open Graph actions for lifestyle apps, including a “rated” action for books, movies and other content.

The new actions, which were pointed out to us by developer Tom Waddington, can be found in Facebook’s Open Graph action schemas for books and videos. There are new actions for “rate” and “quote,” along with “wants to read” and “wants to watch.” “Review” seems to be a new built-in object type, which can apply to reviews for books, movies, TV shows and episodes or other forms of content. There also seems to be a new way for users to share the percentage of a book they’ve completed. “Quote” is likely a way to share a particular passage.

Facebook tells us it has nothing to announce at this time, but it appears book app Goodreads is already testing some of these new Open Graph features. It has implemented the “rated” action and allowed users to share their star rating. According to Facebook’s Open Graph schemas, it seems developers could also enable users to share a number rating or a link to a review page instead of stars.

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This is a guest post by Sarah Reilly, VP of Sales at Blueye, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer.

Facebook recently held a hyped-up press event announcing their new product: Graph Search. In pure Facebook fashion, they made an emotionally charged video on how this product will revolutionize the way users search the Internet. It all led me to reflect – Facebook makes strides in product development that we might not immediately understand. But if marketers look back, they’ll often say, “oh, now I understand why Facebook launched that product.”

From a consumer standpoint, Graph Search tells a pretty compelling story. A key takeaway I noticed is that customers matter and loyalty is key. Why? Because customers will be talking about brands – and their sentiments will influence their friends’ purchasing behavior.

With that in mind, we’ve developed a few ways brands can get ahead of their competitors and leverage Graph Search.
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