Logos from the new Timeline app makers

Facebook on Wednesday unveiled a host of new apps — more than 60 in total — that integrate with its new Timeline user interface. The social networking company also announced it will begin approving Timeline apps running on its Open Graph API from all developers.

“The apps launched at f8 in the music, news and video verticals have seen tremendous success so far. But really, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Our vision for Timeline is that whatever you love, whatever story you want to tell, you can add to your platform.”

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Continue reading Nielsen’s Q3 numbers are out: Android’s still atop the OS chain, Apple remains number one manufacturer

Nielsen’s Q3 numbers are out: Android’s still atop the OS chain, Apple remains number one manufacturer originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Facebook’s Timeline, a re-imagined profile page that captures the history of a user, was the most visually stunning announcement today at the f8 conference. But the new initiative is more than just a design flourish. It’s a bigger push by Facebook to mine the opportunity in the past, giving people a lasting resource and digital diary from all their activities.

This is an opportunity that others having been looking to exploit including such services as Momento, Memolane and Proust , which help create digital timelines and personal journals based on data contributed by the user and pulled from various online sources. Google has started pushing this message home with its “Dear Sophie” commercial, in which a father documents the growth of his daughter by sending her multimedia e-mails of her. And Foursquare has been talking up this angle recently with its new lists functions, which can organize past places, and the new event check-ins, which help people document what they did when they checked-into locations.

The power of the past

The past is increasingly attractive because of the growing amount of things we do online — all this data exhaust we create. As time goes on, there’s a lot that can be done with it, and it has value when it’s aggregated and analyzed. That’s the premise behind more services like RunKeeper’s Health Graph API, which organizes a user’s health and wellness activities and let’s people see how they’re doing over time. As we look at all this information, it can be good for not just preserving memories or helping us understand each other better, but for self-improvement and awareness. We are slowly moving toward a world where everything is being documented by sensors and the next step is to organize and analyze it all, to produce what some call the quantified self.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that Facebook has moved to create a sort of automatic biography for users based on their Facebook lives that they can augment and add to. The site is home to a wealth of personal data that collectively tells a rich story about our lives yet much of it gets lost and has no lasting value to us. By creating a tool to better capture, preserve and visualize it all, Facebook becomes more than a time-killing social network, it becomes the holder of our past.

What Facebook has to gain

Now Facebook isn’t doing this just to help us cherish our memories. The more data it has and the more it understands what has emotional meaning to us, the better it can target us with ads. By letting us preserve the things, activities and apps that matter to us, it gives Facebook an even better way to tailor ads that demand a higher rate from advertisers.

“Our primary business model and it always will be, is advertising,” says Dan Rose, Facebook’s VP of Platforms and Partnerships told Wired’s Steven Levy. “Our platform makes Facebook more interesting so people spend more time on it, because I’m learning about my friends and I’m sharing things about myself and I’m discovering new things. And it also makes it possible for us to put an ad in front of you that’s likely to be interesting to you.”

But Timelines can also be an opportunity to create recommendation tools for users to suggest products they might like based on their tastes and interests. Also, creating more engaging profile pages increases the stickiness of the site and how much time people spend on Facebook.

Perhaps most fundamentally for Facebook, Timeline will give people a new reason to go into oversharing mode. By providing people a way to come back to old entries and gain insights from them, users better see the value of sharing — and the cycle is perpetuated. Maybe you’re nervous about connecting your Spotify account to Facebook. But hey, wouldn’t it be great ten years from now to know what music you were obsessed with? Before, the incentive to share was more limited to how you could impress or communicate with friends in the present time. Photos and videos could obviously be revisited but many things were lost in the past. But Timeline means there can be a point to all of this sharing: a lasting repository that helps paint a picture of your life. And it shows that if you can organize and bring meaning to the past, it can help a company find success in the future.

Can Facebook be your digital scrapbook?

I’m not sure if everyone looks at Facebook as a digital journal and certainly, there is a creepiness factor to overcome in relying on one company to be the steward of your memories. But if Facebook can win over websites and apps to integrate with its updated Open Graph, which will preserve more user activities on Facebook, it will have an even more compelling argument for being a user’s scrapbook. I just wonder if you’ll be able to export any of these Timelines. That would be a great way to lock in users and keep people from defecting. It’s not exactly easy exporting your personal data but if Facebook makes it hard to move your memories somewhere else, it could have a powerful hold on people. And it would show again why owning the past could be even more useful for Facebook.

This move to organize past activity is increasingly what Facebook needs to do, I think, as it exploits the opportunities in its own timeline. It is further exploring the opportunities in the future, by helping people better discover what to do from their friends. And it’s really pushing to make the present more engaging, by encouraging real-time interactions, something Om has called the Alive Web. And it’s capitalizing on the past by making the all of this activity useful as a digital scrapbook. Facebook still has work to do; but today the company is showing that as far as the past goes, it’s got a good chance to be a winner.

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Graph databases are among the more specialized databases around, but as NoSQL keeps gaining mainstream acceptance, they seem to be finding a place in the greater IT consciousness. The latest evidence comes in the form of Neo Technology‘s .6 million funding round for its support of the Neo4j graph database.

Technically, the “NoSQL” label applies to a broad collection of databases that do a wide variety of things, with a single unifying characteristic: that they’re not SQL. Although document-oriented systems (such as MongoDB and CouchDB) and key-value stores (such as Cassandra) get much of the attention because they address common issues around scale, speed and flexibility for web companies and even large enterprises, graph databases are finding their own voice.

As I explained previously while covering GoldenOrb, another graph database:

Essentially, graph databases excel at finding relationships between disparate pieces of data, with one major use case being social graphs. They run analyses over terabytes of graph data while maintaining the relationships between the data, even as the data and the relationships constantly evolve.

Aside from GoldenOrb, an open source product from Austin, Texas-based startup Ravel Data, we’ve also recently seen database veteran Objectivity work its way into the NoSQL space with its InfiniteGraph product.

Graph databases have actually been around for a while, but they’ve gained some popularity recently because of their use with large web properties such as Google and Twitter. Google built its own called Pregel, and Twitter built one called FlockDB.

For its part, Neo4j is an open source database for which the Menlo Park, Calif.-based Neo Technology offers support, services and commercial licenses. Fidelity Growth Partners led this funding round for Neo — its first — along with seed investors Sunstone Capital and Conor Venture Partners.

Images courtesy of Neo4j.

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When the Fanhattan iPad app launched in early June, the idea was to help viewers access the movies and TV shows they wanted to watch across a number of video services available on the Apple tablet. With a unified search function and access to advanced metadata, as well as a smart navigation system, Fanhattan delivered an easy way to find their favorite content wherever it was. The one thing it lacked was a social discovery and recommendations mechanism. That’s been corrected in the latest update, which went live Tuesday.

Fanhattan is betting big on integrating social networks — especially Facebook — which will not only provide more interesting content for users to watch, but will allow them to share their own interests with friends. Once signed in to Facebook on the app, Fanhattan users will be able to get recommendations from their social graph, including movies and TV shows that their friends have liked on the social network.

Users can also “Like” content of their own on Fanhattan, which serves a couple of purposes. First off, liking a piece of content will help Fanhattan recognize what types of movies and TV shows a user is interested in, which will eventually help build its recommendations system. Secondly, the Like function allows users to share their interests with their friends, giving others an idea of what they’re watching.

Liking a show also helps surface posts about related movies, shows and actors on user Facebook walls. As part of the integration, the company has introduced a Fanhattan widget for Facebook, which posts likes to user’s Facebook walls and appears in their friends’ news feeds. When a user likes a piece of content in the app, the widget will let their friends see where they can watch those videos.

But the social elements don’t end with Facebook — Fanhattan has also added Twitter integration to let users participate in conversations around their favorite TV series or movies. Users can now directly follow conversations from within the app, without having to go to Twitter.

Finally, Fanhattan has added support for Vudu, adding a whole new source of streaming content that can be watched on the iPad. The app already let users search between native apps from Netflix, Hulu Plus, iTunes and ABC. By adding Vudu, Fanhattan will, for the first time, also surface content from within the iPad’s Safari browser. That’s because, rather than introducing an app, Vudu is making its streaming video-on-demand service available via a mobile website.

Fanhattan is just the latest video discovery company to embrace social networks for finding out about new videos. Apps like Boxee, as well as web experiences from startups like VHX.tv enable viewers to connect with their friends on social networks and see what they’re watching and sharing. But Fanhattan is the first to get integrated with premium content apps like Netflix and Hulu Plus, which lets them link back directly to Hollywood studio and broadcast TV content.

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There’s no question that Google+ has quickly become the most successful social offering that Google has ever released, racking up more than 25 million users in a matter of weeks. That may still be light years behind Facebook’s user base of more than 750 million, but the search company’s social platform seems to be getting Facebook’s attention, particularly with the recent launch of Google+ social games, such as Angry Birds. While a Facebook executive recently dismissed the Google network as inconsequential, it seems clear that the competition is keeping Facebook awake at night — which may be a good thing.

It was fairly easy for Facebook to dismiss Google’s earlier social efforts such as Buzz and Wave, in much the same way it was easy for users to dismiss them. Neither one managed to gain much traction outside a small group of Google fans and early adopters, in part because Buzz suffered from some serious privacy concerns early on (after it automatically added people from a user’s email address book without making it clear that this would happen) and Wave was just too complicated and the purpose of the service was unclear. Although Buzz continues to exist — for now — Wave has been shut down.

Google+ is everything Google’s other social efforts weren’t

Google+, by contrast, has been hailed by many users as everything Google’s previous social efforts weren’t: attractively designed, easy to use, and with some appealing features such as the use of Circles to separate a user’s social graph into different groups. The company’s approach to the use of pseudonyms has gotten criticism from users — including us — but apart from that it has been well received. And according to comScore, Google+ got to 25 million users more than 10 times faster than any other service in the history of social networking (although some are already complaining it is a ghost town).

Last week, Google upped the ante by adding social games including the popular Angry Birds and Bejeweled to the platform. And that entry into social games definitely got Facebook’s attention, since games are one of the big drivers of revenue and engagement on the larger social network, thanks to a partnership with social-gaming leader Zynga.

Not only did Facebook quickly tweak its game-related features to make them more appealing to developers such as Zynga, but a Facebook executive seemed downright snippy when asked about this new competitor at a recent game-industry event, according to a report in Fortune magazine. In talking about Google’s offer to developers — the search company is offering to take only 5 percent of the proceeds from games, in contrast to Facebook’s 30 percent — director of game partnerships Sean Ryan said:

Google is at 5 percent because they don’t have any users.

Like McDonald’s and Starbucks

Ryan went on to describe Google’s effort as being similar to McDonald’s getting into coffee in an attempt to compete with Starbucks (although that might not be the best comparison from Facebook’s point of view, since a number of analysts believe McDonald’s entry into the coffee business put substantial competitive pressure on Starbucks). And the Facebook executive described Google’s launch as a copycat move, saying the company had managed to “emulate aspects of our system, which… they have the right to do.”

Games aren’t the only element of Google+ that seems to be getting on Facebook’s nerves. There have also been reports — which have been circulated on Google’s network by the company’s head of social, Vic Gundotra — that invitation links to Google+ posted on users’ Facebook pages are not showing up. Given the history of tension between the two companies over issues such as the exporting of contact information, there has been speculation that Facebook might be blocking these links, but the social network says that it isn’t aware of any such blocking.

Can Google+ become a full-fledged competitor for Facebook? The web giant has said that the launch of social games is “just the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to what the company plans to add to its social platform, and some see mobile photo-sharing as a big element of Google’s plans for the future — in part because of the recent launch of a mobile photo application called Photovine. This would take Google+ straight into another core product area for Facebook, which has become the world’s largest photo-hosting service.

This isn’t just about competing with Facebook

As I described in a recent GigaOM Pro report (subscription required), Google is making this push into social networking not just because it wants to compete with Facebook, but because it needs to tap into the “social signals” and activity that users are engaging in on such networks as part of its core search and advertising business. And Google’s new CEO and co-founder Larry Page has made it clear that these efforts are a central part of what the company wants to do by restructuring Google’s incentive system to compensate employees who contribute to its social plans.

Facebook may have had the social-networking business more or less to itself for the past few years, thanks in part to the rapid decline of MySpace, but Google has made it obvious that it wants to become a major player — and while it is still early, the launch of Google+ shows that the search giant may just have what it takes to put some competitive pressure on the larger network. In the long run, that is likely to be good for Facebook users, and for developers of third-party applications as well.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Mark Strozier and Jennie Moo

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