Facebook Event 2013

Published on 20 Feb 2013 at 11:29 am.
Filed under Social Media.

Today Facebook held an event to talk about the future of their company at their Menlo Park headquarters. Want to know what they had to say?

Facebook Event: The Graph Search

Facebook believes there are three pillars of the Facebook ecosystem — News Feed, Timeline, and the Graph Search. Most people are already familiar with the News Feed and Timeline. Graph Search is something new.

Graph Search allows Facebook to search through your friends comments, likes, and check-ins for things that they care about. For example, there are many people out there that are fans of Game of Thrones. You will now be able to search for Game of Thrones and have Facebook return all of your friends that have liked the Game of Thrones page. This would work by typing “Friends Who” and then their search query. You can also find people who like roller skating and live in your home town.

The Graph Search is powered by Bing. This means you will be able to do web searches from within Facebook. Searches like “Weather in San Diego” will show the current weather in San Diego.

Facebook Event: Updated Messaging System

Facebook is working to make messaging easier. Recently you may have noticed that Facebook has created an email address for you that is your username @facebook.com. Facebook recognizes that you have people in your life that want to communicate with that will never join a social media network. For instance, you may have trouble teaching your grandmother how to use Facebook. Email is simple. Now your grandmother can email you and you will be able to receive the message within Facebook. You can even respond back to her!

This system is not email. It is not a replacement for email. Emails sent to you will show up in your chat window. To you it will work exactly like chat. This system will work with Jabber/XMPP and text messaging if you so choose. They will not have IMAP support at launch, but it is on the way.

This new system will now support file attachments. They know that users sometimes need to send each other files. You will be able to do this.

Facebook will be using a Social Inbox. Facebook feels they know who you consider important. They know that you have friends on Facebook that are not truly friends. They know your true friends deserve better. By default your friends and their friends go to your Messages folder. Everything else falls into the Other folder or the Junk folder. That email from your grandmother would go to your Other folder to start with, but you will be able to move into the Messages folder. You can even move your friends into the Other folder.

Facebook knows that email addresses can become compromised. They have created a privacy setting that would allow you to restrict your messages to your @facebook.com address to everyone, friends of friends, or friends only.

Voice and video support are not available at this time. It is something they will consider in the future if user demand warrants.

Message forwarding and group messages are new features that are now supported by the messaging system.

This post was originally published as Facebook Event 2013 for The BrandBuilder Company.