These are my notes from the The Search for a More Social Web talk by Dave Morin.

I had expected this talk to be about lessons learned by Facebook along the way as they've built the site. It actually was more of a product launch keynote and overview of recent launches.

There was a brief preamble about the history of communications from carrier pigeons and the postal service to telegrams and computers. Computers have become increasingly social from when they were first connected into a major computer network as ARPANET, followed by the creation of the World Wide Web, then email [ed note - I think he has his chronology wrong with this one] and chat. However social communications via computers hasn't really come into its own until recently.

Facebook has been working on the social graph for a few years. With Facebook, people for the first time are sharing their real identities and personal content on the Web in a big way. As time has gone by the nature of Facebook's social graph has changed. What was once a graph of relationships between college kids is now a graph that include  coworkers, friends, families and even celebrities.

There are three key pillars in the current Facebook experience

1. The stream (which used to be called the news feed): A chronologically sorted list of what people in your social network are saying, sharing and doing.
2. Social everywhere: With Facebook Connect they have now made it possible to bring social to every site on the Web.
3. The social graph: The graph of connections between users which has been expanded to enable users to connect to everything they care about. The recently announced changes to Facebook Pages now enables brands to participate as nodes in the graph and show up in the stream. Examples of such profiles around celebrities and brands on Facebook include CNN, Barack Obama and U2.

At this point, Dave Morin brought on Gary Vaynerchuck from Wine Library TV to talk about his experiences using the new, improved Facebook Pages to promote his brand and connect with his fans. The first comment Gary made was being glad that he no longer had to put under with the 5000 friend limit if he wanted to be able to participate fully in Facebook. He considers the changes to have turned Facebook into a word-of-mouth marketing machine on steroids. When he posts a video, it shows up in real time in the news feeds of his thousands of fans who can then redistribute it to their social networks if they like or dislike it with the click of a button [ed note – I really love that Facebook explicitly separate the notion of re-share and "like" instead of what FriendFeed does]. With Facebook he has the ability to note only broadcast to his customers but also listen to them by reading the hundreds of comments they leave in response to his videos. He considers this an important paradigm shift in how brands communicate with users and considers Facebook to be the most powerful social media marketing tool around today.

Dave then gave an overview of the four key aspects of the redesigned homepage shown below.

Filters enable you to control what content you see in your stream. The stream is a real-time stream of changes from your social network. The publisher allows you to share your thoughts or interesting content. The highlights section functions like the old news feed by showing you content from people you interact with the most or other notable content from your stream so you don't miss it.

The talk then switched focus to Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect enables all 175 million users of the site to take their Facebook experience to a host of partner sites. There are currently 6000 websites that have implemented Facebook Connect including TechCrunch, Vimeo, Meetup, Geni and Joost. All of these services have mentioned increased engagement from their user base from deploying Facebook Connect. TechCrunch has been getting higher quality comments from people who use the integration since it is attached to their real names. When you combine Joost with Boxee, it is now possible to see social to television by seeing what your friends are watching from your TV. There is also Aardvark social search engine which also will be integrating Facebook Connect [ed note – not clear this last one has actually shipped].

Facebook Connect has not only been used to bring social to the web but also to the desktop as well. Two key examples are Xobni integrating with Facebook Connect to bring social to your desktop email client and Apple iPhoto adding the ability to upload photos directly to Facebook. At this point Dave brought on Loic Le Meur of Seesmic who announced a new desktop client built on Adobe Air for interacting with Facebook now available at http://www.seesmic.com/facebook . You can find out more about this on Loic's blog post about the launch at Seesmic Launches the First Facebook Desktop Client Available Today. Screenshot of the application below. It only does status updates for now but is expected to show richer media types in forthcoming releases.

The question then is what are the next steps for Facebook with regards to their platform. In 2006, they shipped their first set of APIs. In 2007, they shipped the Facebook platform which now has over 50,000 applications. 2008 was the year of Facebook Connect. In 2009, they have done a couple of things thus far. They have opened up APIs to status, notes, links and videos. They are now active in community standards like OpenID and ActivityStreams where they are ably represented by Luke Shepard. They have also contributed to open source projects like memcached.

one more thing…

Dave announced Facebook Connect for the iPhone. He then brought on a number of CEOs of various iPhone application companies to talk about upcoming or just released applications for the iPhone that will integrate with Facebook. The CEO of Playfish which makes three of the top ten games on the Facebook platform and has over 60 million users was the first to speak. They are debuting Who has the biggest brain? for the iPhone. You can challenge your friends on Facebook and see where you rank with them directly from the iPhone. He was followed by the CEO of Social Gaming Network (SGN) which is debuting at least two games with Facebook integration. The first is Agency Wars where users can create a secret agent character then recruit or assassinate their Facebook friends. They are also the makers of iBowl which will be updated with the ability to see when your Facebook friends are online and challenge them to a game of bowling. One of the co-founders of Tapulous was next to talk about their next product Tap Tap Revenge 2 which is shipping with not only 250 new songs but also will use Facebook Connect so that you can challenge your Facebook friends to games in a new split-screen mode. Although they have their own social network it pales in comparison to the highly connected, 175 million user strong social graph on Facebook. Patrick O'Donell from Urbanspoon also spoke about their Facebook integration. Urbanspoon has 1 million restaurant reviews and 4 million iPhone users who have used the "shake" feature of the application over 200 million times. The key integration with Facebook is that restaurant reviews entered via your phone will now show up on your profile in Facebook and in your friends' stream. Joe Greenstein of Flixster was the final iPhone application developer to talk about their Facebook integration. They have 3.4 million users of their application on the iPhone and will now gives those users the ability to integrate their Facebook identity with the application. There are more iPhone applications expected to ship with Facebook integration in the coming weeks including applications from Zynga, Loopt, CitySearch, MTV, Citizen Sports and more.

More details on the Facebook Connect for iPhone announcement can be found on the Facebook official blog post entitled Facebook Connect for iPhone: Friends Now Included.

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