As Facebook continues to review and approve new Open Graph actions, the social network announced a number of changes affecting developers working on the platform.

Action specs – The Ads API now allows developers to create Featured Stories (previously called “Sponsored Stories”) using action specs rather than by ad creative type. This will make it easier for developers to adapt to new story types when they are launched (i.e., promoting stories about users listening to a song or earning a high score rather than simply “using an app” or “playing a game”). The old Sponsored Stories creative types will be deprecated as of May 1. The company provided more detail in a blog post here.

Test user passwords - Facebook added the option to set a test user’s password now from the Developer App to make it easier for developers to test their mobile apps. Developers can change the password of a test users from the “roles” section of the Developer App.

Access tokens – Facebook reminded developers not to share access tokens between applications to ensure the security of those tokens.

Game Developer Conference – The company will host Facebook Developer Day at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco on March 5. Conference attendees can learn more about developing social games on the platform through tutorials and discussions. More details are available here.

Page insights deprecation – Facebook will completely remove the old page insights from the API on Feb. 15.

New auth dialog – All apps will be able to use the improved authorization dialog on Feb. 15. Developers who haven’t fully configured the new dialog can disable the setting from the Developer App until the end of the month. All apps will be required to use the new dialog starting March 1.

Historical actions - Facebook has taken Open Graph action backdating out of beta. Developers can now make posts to previous dates on users’ Timelines. We covered the change in more depth here.

For more breaking changes and information about bugs, see Facebook’s Developer Blog.

Open Graph apps can now post to past points on users’ Timelines, according to a post on the Facebook Developer Blog. The feature, previously in beta, enables a new wave of applications that let users fill in their profiles. For instance, users can use Wipolo to indicate that they went on a trip in June 2004 and have that activity display at the right date on Timeline. Urbanspoon users can check into restaurants after the fact and have the action automatically show up in the appropriate spot. Apps that help users chronicle their past like this are a key way to enhance Timeline and could be a big opportunity for marketers and developers to engage consumers in new ways. Actions that are set more than three days in the past will not show in Ticker or News Feed. This will allow users to fill in several aspects of their Timelines at once without overtaking their friends’ feeds. Past actions will populate the monthly and yearly app aggregations as predefined by the developer.

Facebook added a new section on its developer site focused on publishing past actions. It encourages developers to provide transparency about how past actions will be posted and give users control over the functions. Posting past actions will generate a notification indicating that a past action has been posted to a user’s Timeline.

There are still some trade-offs associated with using Open Graph. Images, for example, cannot be shared as large as they can with the Photos API. (We covered these issues in more depth here.) But overall, Facebook has smartly added more resources for those working with Open Graph to promote past-tense sharing.

This post is an excerpt from the NEW, revamped Facebook Marketing Bible — a major update to the leading resource for marketing and advertising strategies on Facebook. If you’re interested in learning more about this upcoming update, check out a preview at The Facebook Marketing Bible.

The Recommendations Bar is one of Facebook’s newest social plugins, and the first to integrate the social reading and frictionless sharing capabilities of Open Graph. Put simply, the Recommendations Bar allows any website to implement the same social reading and social recommendation features found in “social reader” style applications from the Washington Post, The Guardian or USA Today. The plugin is still in beta, which means that when installed, it is only viewable to developers and testers associated with the website or application. Normal site visitors cannot yet see or interact with the plugin. However, once the Recommendations Bar becomes publicly accessible, we expect it to be a highly effective tool for any news site looking to increase referral traffic and reader engagement.

The Recommendations Bar enables three essential social  functions:

Social recommendations

The Recommendations Bar prompts readers with other articles when they finish the one they’re reading, using Social Graph data to recommend the most relevant articles. This includes articles that a user’s friends have liked or articles that have received a high volume of likes and comments. Essentially, the same “secret sauce” that goes into ranking News Feed posts and Comments is leveraged in the Recommendations Bar, ensuring that readers are recommended articles that are relevant to their interests and social connections.

Omnipresent Like Button that “follows” the user

The Recommendations Bar creates a Like button that doesn’t move, even when users scrolls or resize their browser windows. Many sites currently struggle to determine the most effective placement for the Like button. Should it appear at the top near the byline? At the end of the article near the comments section? As part of the sidebar? The Recommendations bar is a much more elegant solution, as it eliminates the need to place a Like button in a particular location on a given page — its position is relative to the user’s browser window, not relative to site content. While this can be done using relatively simple HTML and CSS, Facebook’s solution is even simpler to implement, and the sizing and display has been thought through down to the pixel.

Social reading through frictionless sharing

The Recommendations Bar allows users to turn on social reading, the same functionality that’s available within canvas applications like the Washington Post Social Reader, USAToday + Me, and The Guardian. Except while those companies spent time and money creating a canvas application within Facebook, the Recommendations Bar provides the same functionality on any pre-existing website, with minimal effort. If you’ve seen stories pop up in your News Feed and Ticker like Brendan read “Facebook CEO speaks out against SOPA, PIPA” on Washington Post Social Reader, the Recommendations Plugin can generate the same kind of rich Open Graph story.

Continue reading for a preview of the NEW Facebook Marketing Bible coming in February!

With Facebook users now able to make posts to previous dates — as far back even as their birth — there is an opportunity for developers to build apps that facilitate this “past-tense sharing.” There are, however, a few issues the social network will have to address in its API to allow these apps to integrate more seamlessly with Timeline.

Shoebox, UrbanSpoon and Wipolo, for example, have all sought to help users fill in their new profiles, but none has been able to do so in an ideal way because of deficiencies in Open Graph.

1000memories‘ mobile app Shoebox is releasing an update today that lets people scan paper photos, upload them directly to Facebook and tag their friends and family. The app prompts users to indicate when the photo is from, but this data cannot be synced with Facebook so that the photo appears in the appropriate spot on a user’s Timeline. 1000memories co-founder Brett Huneycutt says Open Graph does not allow photos to be displayed as big as they are when posted through the Photos API. As a trade-off, Shoebox uses the Photos API instead of Open Graph, but this requires users to manually edit images’ positions on Timeline. Huneycutt says his team is working with Facebook to find alternative solutions.

Another problem with Open Graph is that individual actions are not given much, if any, weight unless users manually adjust settings in the activity log. This makes sense most of the time — people don’t want every song they listen to or article they read to show up as separate stories on Timeline. But when apps want to share more significant actions, there is not an optimal way to do this. For example, if people use Wipolo to indicate trips they have taken, the app will display monthly or yearly summaries of their travel; but it will not feature each trip at its actual date on Timeline. To do that, users need to visit their activity log and select “Shown on Timeline,” but even then the story appears much smaller than if people used Facebook’s native “life events” feature. (See below for images.) The trip also won’t appear on Timeline’s built-in Map.

Developers cannot currently access life events through the API, though the social network has indicated that it is working to provide it. If Facebook offered write permissions for life events, developers could build apps that help users easily fill in their Timelines without formatting trade-offs.

Even when format is not an issue, some developers have been unable to take advantage of past-tense sharing on Facebook. Mobile app Urbanspoon allows users to check into restaurants and select a past date if desired. Although this updates a user’s “Dineline” within the app, the action does not yet sync with Facebook properly if users choose a time more than 24 hours ago. Backdating is apparently only available to select partners, though this is unclear from Open Graph documentation. Urbanspoon senior software developer Brian Dewey says Facebook told his team that it would support the feature in the next few weeks.

[Update 2/3/12 8:23 a.m. - Facebook Platform Product Manager Eddie O'Neil confirms on Quora, "Facebook has temporarily disabled backdating actions and will re-enable this in the future. For context, this worked during the Open Graph developer preview, but there's some outstanding work that we are finishing before making this feature available to developers."]

[Update 2/6/12 10:01 a.m. - Facebook has taken the feature out of beta and provided developers with additional resources about publishing to past points on users' Timelines.]

The tools and access the social network offers developers will determine if Timeline can truly become “the story of your life on one page,” as it was pitched at f8. Open Graph clearly helps users document their lives moving forward, but developers will need more support from Facebook to build apps to share users’ histories.

How photos display on Timeline using Open Graph vs. Photos API

With Open Graph, images display as a thumbnail and link out to another site.

When apps use the Photos API, images can be shown full size on Timeline and added to a Facebook album. However, apps do not get proper links as they do when using the Open Graph API.

How past trips display on Timeline using a third-party app vs. life events

When users add a past trip via Wipolo, a story appears in the private activity log as so:

It also appears as part of an aggregate story at the end of a month or year:

If a user chooses to show a Wipolo action on Timeline, a small story appears on appropriate Timeline spot, but without the ability to resize.

When a user adds a trip using Facebook’s life event feature, this produces a larger Timeline story that includes a bigger image and the option to resize.

With Open Graph actions, users can now interact with and share things on the web in more nuanced ways than liking or posting. The new dynamics between apps, Timeline, Ticker and News Feed means more options for brand exposure on Facebook, but not necessarily in ways brands can control or own. Instead, marketers will need to think beyond their Facebook pages and consider partnership opportunities with other apps, as well as how to build new experiences for the web and mobile devices that last beyond a single campaign.

A lot of the actions users take in Open Graph apps are going to involve commercial products or entities. People will be able to “watch” movies, “wear” designer items, “drink” beverages and so on. Most of these actions will not be taken within brand-specific apps. Instead they’ll be made via Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Foodspotting and other third-party platforms. As a result, we may start to see more brands directing people to these apps. For example, a movie page on Facebook could link to the Rotten Tomatoes page after opening weekend and tell fans to rate the movie, knowing this will generate additional impressions among a user’s friends. Brands will also be more likely to partner with apps to offer promotions or be featured in some way now that their reach will be much greater. This is because instead of waiting for users to actively share things on Facebook, Open Graph apps can continuously publish lightweight stories about users’ activity. As a result, formerly niche communities like the aforementioned Pose or Foodspotting could become more viable marketing avenues.

Marketers might be tempted to create their own Open Graph apps, but they will need to think more long term than they previously have with Facebook. Timeline apps provide value through use over time, helping users share part of their identity or learn something about their own habits. These apps are not ideal for one-off promotions. If marketers create them solely to take advantage of “frictionless sharing,” users are likely to recognize them as spam.

Another important point about Open Graph apps is that since they benefit from users taking repeated action, they work well as mobile and web integrations not page tab apps. A few of Facebook’s more than 60 Open Graph partners developed canvas applications, but none were using page tabs. We suspect this is in part because tabs apps are unavailable on mobile and pages could be converted to the Timeline format sometime this year. Marketers should be mindful of how much they invest in page tab apps moving forward and instead consider what kind of Open Graph integration or partnerships would be most relevant for their consumers.

See our breakdown of Open Graph apps by category here.

Image credit: Facebook

Facebook and Vevo have met at least twice and the most recent talks took place earlier this month about bringing the popular music video service to the social network’s platform and sharing ad revenue, according unnamed CNET sources.

Scoring a deal with Vevo would be a huge win for Facebook over Google. The social network drives a lot of traffic for videos around the web, but is not a video destination itself. Vevo is an industry-backed website for music videos that are also syndicated on YouTube. According to CNET, the discussions are very preliminary — Vevo’s contract with Google is not up for another year yet – but could result in an ad revenue sharing model similar to what Google and Vevo have now. In November 2011, the NY Post reported that Vevo was looking to renegotiate its deal with Google, which since 2009 has given the company 35 percent of its revenue from the ads played before Vevo’s videos on YouTube.

According to ComScore, Google was the top online video content property in December with 157.2 million unique viewers, mostly on YouTube.com. Vevo ranked second with 53.7 million, and Facebook was fifth overall with 42 million. Vevo, though, is YouTube’s top channel overall, with over 53 billion views generating major revenue for both companies.

What Google could lose, Facebook stands to gain and possibly improve upon. Although YouTube is far and away the most popular video site in terms of unique viewers and time spent per viewer, it has not capitalized on its opportunity as a social network. There is little incentive for users to log in to YouTube and the site is filled with spam and hate from anonymous commenters. Google is likely looking for ways to incorporate Google+ to address these issues, but it’s interesting to see how Vevo is already using Facebook on its standalone site.

Vevo has Open Graph integration, which means that when users watch videos on Vevo.com, the activity shows in Ticker, Timeline and News Feed. When people watch the same videos on Vevo’s YouTube channel, the activity is not shared on Facebook. Vevo.com also uses the Facebook comments plugin, which surfaces comments from a user’s friends first and helps demote spam. Vevo.com similarly includes Like buttons that YouTube does not.

The social network currently offers video ads as a premium unit on the homepage, but because the units are small and opt-in, they are not ideal for advertisers who can get guaranteed views on other sites that run pre-roll ads. Facebook wants to preserve the user experience by keeping ads minimal, but billions of Vevo views suggest many users will accept these ads. A partnership with Facebook could allow Vevo ads to play directly in News Feed and Timeline. Currently Vevo.com links do not embed video on Facebook. Videos from Vevo’s YouTube channel do play directly within Facebook, but do not include pre-roll ads.

What is unclear, though, is how deeply the social network would incorporate music videos into its core product. For instance, Facebook could make Vevo videos discoverable from search as opposed to requiring users to visit a canvas app. The company positions itself as a platform for others to build upon, not a media site like MySpace, but to compete with Google, Facebook has to offer Vevo a bigger or at least more profitable audience.

Facebook will review new Open Graph apps that want to create custom actions and integrate Timeline starting today, the social network announced at a San Francisco press event.

[Update 1/19/12 8:33 a.m. PT: If developers want to use a custom verb in their app, they must submit it for review. An earlier version of this story incorrectly suggested Facebook would approve any app.]

Facebook’s Carl Sjogreen took the stage on Wednesday night’s event to walk the audience through the new app authorization dialog, which was detailed earlier today in a developer blog post. App content will show in three places: recent activity, Timeline and in the monthly/yearly summaries that appear within Timeline.

“Whatever you want to do,” Sjorgreen says, “there will be an app to tell your story.”

As part of the announcement, Facebook also revealed 60 new partners utilizing Open Graph apps. These apps, available now, span everything from Rotten Tomatoes movies people want to see to Airbnb accommodation reviews. Other partners announced during the event include Ticketmaster, Pinterest, Ford, Polyvore, LivingSocial, Foodspotting, Yummly, StubHub, MapMyRun and more.

Facebook’s “Move fast and break things” mantra was put into action again this year as the company overhauled a number of its products, introduced many new features and eliminated old functionality. Here is a month-by-month review of changes that most affected users, marketers and developers on the platform in 2011.

January

Redesigned Profiles
Facebook started the year with a new look for profile pages. With Timeline on everyone’s minds now, it can be easy to forget that 12 months ago the social network had redesigned profiles to include more photos and information at a glance, eliminating the horizontal tab structure that had been in place since 2008.

All-in-One Messaging
Users began to get access to the new Messages product, which groups all direct messages between users whether they are viewing a conversation from the inbox, chat window or mobile.

Sponsored Stories
In an effort to make advertising more relevant by including social context, Facebook introduced Sponsored Stories that allow advertisers to pay to promote activity on the site, such as likes or check-ins. The company added more Sponsored Story types in April and June.

Memorable Status Updates
Perhaps hinting at the nostalgia-inducing Timeline to come later in the year, Facebook began displaying users’ status updates and stories from the past.

Secure Browsing
Facebook started giving users the option of accessing Facebook over an encrypted connection and encouraged developers to obtain a Secure Sockets Layer certificate to make their iframe apps accessible to users with secure browsing enabled. Since then, the company has prompted users to switch to HTTPS and made SSL certificates mandatory for all developers.

February

Page Redesign
Page owners got a number of new features to help them manage their communities. These included activity notifications, “Use Facebook as a Page,” and a spam filter for comments. Fan pages were also designed to look more like the new user profiles and place pages, which displayed applications vertically on the left hand side rather than in tabs across the top. Advertisers also gained the option of driving ads to any landing tab, not just the default.

Improved Like Button 
Clicking the Like Button began sharing full-sized stories in the News Feed rather than the one-line Recent Activity stories it previously generated. This along with the Send button that came in April have replaced the Share button, which Facebook no longer supports.

Real-Time Commenting
Facebook made commenting more like chat by removing the “Post” button and instead publishing comments after a user hits “enter” on the keyboard. Since this leads to more accidental comments, Facebook later began giving users a 12-second window to edit their comment.

March

Questions
After a Q&A product similar to Quora never made it out of beta in 2010, Facebook relaunched Questions as a poll feature aimed at helping users get recommendations from their friends. Pages began using the feature to engage their fans with questions that had a more viral effect than plain-text posts.

Deals Subscription Service
Facebook seemed to be taking on Groupon when it began a new pre-paid deals service for users in select cities, but it discontinued the test in August.

April

Updated Groups
Ahead of the rumored Google+ launch, Facebook made improvements to its Groups product aimed at helping people share with subsets of their friends. Most notably, group admins gained the ability to approve people before they are added to the group. Users could now also upload photo albums or ask Questions within groups.

Send Button
The Send button was introduced as a way for people to share articles and third-party websites with groups of friends, whereas the Like button posts to all a users’ friends.

May

New Ad Analytics
Facebook made several changes to its advertising analytics dashboard to focus on performance indicators such as Page Likes, app installs and social reach, rather than older online advertising metrics such as CPM.

Recommend This Place
The social network implemented a recommendation box on place pages (and fan pages that included an address) so that users can share their opinions about a location or a business.

Tag Pages in Photos
Users and pages gained the ability to tag other pages in photos they share on the site. This increases the reach of any given photo and builds additional connections between users and pages.

June

Happening Now: Prelude to Ticker
Facebook began testing a “Happening Now” module on the right hand side of the page. This later became the Ticker, which shows more recent activity from your friends, including comments, page likes and now Open Graph activity like listening to a song in Spotify.

July

Mandatory Credits
All developers on the Facebook platform became required to use Credits as the sole payment option for their social games. The company had announced a July 1 deadline at the beginning of the year and then added additional payment options and feedback channels for developers over the next few months to support the transition.

Video Calling and Group Chat
Teaming up with Skype, Facebook integrated video calling into its chat product. The social network also expanded group chat to friends who were not already in designated groups. Users can now add any friend to a chat conversation.

August

Revised Privacy Controls
The company simplified its privacy settings page and moved controls to the profile editor and news feed publisher. Users also gained the ability to approve tags in photos, check-ins and statuses.

Canvas App Page Changes

Facebook made several changes to the Canvas Page, bookmarking and games stories in the news feed in order to improve game discovery, retention and user experience. The redesign added a real-time activity ticker dedicated to stories about a user’s friends engaging with games.

Expanded Ads API
Facebook brought its ad API out of private beta and began allowing more developers to build tools and services that programmatically create, buy and manage Facebook ad campaigns.

Standalone Messenger App
Moving away from its all-in-one mobile application strategy, Facebook released Messenger as a separate app to rival texting and group chat alternatives.

New Locations App for Pages
Some corporations gained access to a beta product that allows them to designate multiple locations under a parent page and include a store finder on the page.

September

Timeline
At F8, Facebook unveiled a new version of user profiles that organizes stories in a timeline format, giving users the option to add life events to any point in their personal history.

Open Graph Application Platform
Along with Timeline, the company announced a new way to connect people and objects beyond the Like button. Developers will be able to make apps that let users share what they are reading, watching, listening to, cooking and more. Along with this comes “frictionless sharing” and additional avenues for app discovery.

Reconfigured News Feed
To accommodate this new type of Open Graph app, Facebook redesigned the home page to include News Feed and Ticker.

Subscribe
Facebook introduced a new one-way follow dynamic with its Subscribe button. Users can subscribe to the public updates of anyone who allows subscribers. This gives the social network a way to compete with Twitter and Google+.

Smart Lists
The social network introduced Smart Lists to automatically group users’ friends by location, workplace and school. As users become comfortable with Facebook grouping friends automatically, we could see Facebook’s algorithms creating more nuanced lists that compete with Google’s Circles feature.

October

Mobile Platform
After much speculation, the company unveiled a way to help mobile developers market their native and HTML5-based apps through its platform. Developers can now take advantage of bookmarks, requests and the news feed in the same way that Facebook canvas developers do.

Talking About This
Facebook added a new public metric to pages called “Talking About This.” This metric encourages pages to think about engagement, not just accumulating Likes.

iPad Application
Facebook released its official iPad app after months of leaks and rumors about its development.

November

Sponsored Stories in Ticker
The social network began showing Sponsored Story ads in the Ticker, signaling more lines being blurred between paid and organic content in the future. The company later told us Sponsored Story ads will be shown within the News Feed starting in 2012.

December

Timeline Goes Live
Facebook began its global release of the Timeline profile developers had gotten a preview of at F8. Timeline is still opt-in for users until sometime in early 2012. The company also debuted Timeline on mobile devices for the first time.

Coupon Test
We discovered Facebook testing a new coupon post feature for pages that could have big implications for next year. Pages that are part of this beta can offer discounts and promote them with Sponsored Stories.

Private Message Test
We have also seen the social network testing a way for users to privately message page owners. This, too, could have a big impact for people using Facebook for business in 2012.

Facebook has two algorithms that are important to marketers and developers but are largely misunderstood by people across industries.

Graph Rank and EdgeRank are what the social network uses to organize the massive amount of activity generated by people, pages and apps and to decide what stories to show whom. Graph Rank applies to Open Graph applications, not page posts or friend’s status updates. Those are affected by EdgeRank, which determines what shows up in your News Feed. Neither of these is a global score. Every bit of activity on the site has a different rank for different users. And because time and affinity plays a role, the rank of each object is not constant.

EdgeRank is the algorithm that determines what items populate your News Feed. With all the friends people have and pages they like, most users would be overwhelmed to see all of the activity generated by these connections. Facebook, therefore, assigns a value to every possible story that could end up in the feed. This value is based on affinity, weight and time. Affinity is the relationship between the user and the page or friend that created an item. Weight is affected by the type of story, for instance, whether it is a photo upload or a comment on another person’s status. Facebook tends to value rich media content and often when it introduces something new like Questions, it temporarily weights activity from that feature higher. The third factor affecting EdgeRank is how recently an action was taken.

These factors are why you might see every check-in and linked shared by your best friend, but only see whole photo albums from someone else. EdgeRank is also the reason most fans don’t see every post from pages they like. The more users interact with the page, however, the greater the affinity score becomes and the more likely they are to see page posts in the future.

Graph Rank is a new algorithm Facebook is using to determine how Open Graph application activity will be distributed through News Feed, Ticker and Timeline. Graph Rank was introduced at F8 with the announcement of a new type of app that can continuously publish user activity to Ticker and Timeline. Because Facebook expects a proliferation of sharing through these Open Graph apps, it developed a system to manage the amount and type of activity that each user will see. Graph Rank seeks to show users highly relevant application stories based on the other connections they’ve made on Facebook. So if a user plays Words With Friends, they are more likely to see a friend’s story about another word game than a story about an arcade shooter.

This seems to be a reaction to the negative feedback Facebook received after first allowing third-party apps on the platform. Many users were frustrated with the amount of app activity that filled their feeds. The social network initially responded by cutting off several viral channels that allowed apps to grow organically. This left a sour taste in the mouths of many developers. With Graph Rank, Facebook hopes to strike a balance that helps users discover apps they are likely to enjoy without compromising the site or turning off developers.

Together, EdgeRank and Graph Rank help personalize Facebook for each user. Marketers and developers who understand the way the platform ranks content can find ways to optimize their efforts there.

Images from http://www.livestream.com/f8conference and http://www.livestream.com/f8live.

Some users are seeing a “Suggested Events” feature that recommends events based on pages they like and places they’ve been, as first reported by TechCrunch. This replaces and expands upon the “Friends’ Events” section that listed events to which others had RSVP’d.

[Update 12/23/11 10:45 a.m. PST: We have learned Suggested Events also includes recommendations based on artists users have listened to.]

Suggested Events is an example of how Facebook can leverage data beyond the social graph, connecting users to things based on interest and location as well. As users like more pages, add location to their photos and status updates and use new Open Graph applications, the social network can provide more interesting and relevant recommendations for events and other items.

For example, in the past users might have been shown an event listing for a concert that their friend is attending. Now with Suggested Events, users might be shown upcoming concerts at venues they’ve checked into or from bands whose pages they like. In the future, Facebook could display events based on artists people have listened to on Spotify or other Open Graph apps. [Update 12/23/11 10:45 a.m. PST: Facebook has confirmed this is already happening.] This will help users discover things to do and help event promoters reach potential attendees.

The problem with Suggested Events in its current iteration is that users are unlikely to find it on their own. As a submenu item under the main Events tab, it could be just as invisible as the “Other” folder within Messages that many users are unaware of. Suggested Events, however, could be something Facebook occasionally decides to display on the right hand side of the page to let people know it exists. This space has previously shown users their unread updates and prompted people to take actions such as adding location to photo albums.

We’ve seen the social network making other changes to Events in the past two months to make the product more relevant to users. This includes changing language to make events seem less formal and possibly adding the ability to create events from the publisher. Unlike Messages and Photos, Events is not something most people use daily. These latest improvements could lead to more regular use.