Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend all of today’s sessions and talks. I was upset because good friends like George El Khabbaz, Joumana Mattar and Maya Zankoul gave UX talks I would’ve loved to attend, but, all was not lost. Stephane Crozatier, a Facebook engineer tasked with helping develop social products for strategic Facebook partners through the open graph.

Now, that sounds super-geeky and programmer language, but luckily for you, I’m not a computer scientist and thus will relay what I understood and discovered today from the session: why the timeline?

Stephane talked about how Facebook has created a graph that has several nodes. Nodes are people and brands, and the network you create with people you friend and things you like, make the open graph everyone is so hyped about. Why are they hyped? Well, because it is the mother of all treasures when it comes to data mining: what you like, who you surround yourself with and what you do, every marketer’s dream data. Of course, if you don’t allow it, this graph will remain off-limits to websites and corporations.

Anyway, after introducing what the graph and Facebook Platform were, Stephane went on to discuss the rationale behind this new “evolutionary leap” in Facebook world. “Talking about things on Facebook is nice, but doing things on Facebook is nicer” pretty much summed up the Facebook mantra in a very simple and elegant way.

We used to send notifications to our pages, for example “Gino likes X article.” Today, you get “Gino read X article on Y website” in realtime, and with a “widget” on my timeline with the actual article. This also applies for music I listen to on SoundCloud for example, or photos I pin on Pinterest. Now, I can do those things via Facebook, or at least do more than “shallow link” to the homepage, but actually initiate an action via Facebook on the third party website.

You’d think, why would Facebook do that? Why would they grant access to their 850 million+ users to lesser online players? Well, why not? Facebook doesn’t only allow partners to utilize the graph (with user permission of course), they also help the strategic partners with their endeavors and perfect their social products, because according to Stephane, “it creates a viral loop” to which I completely agree.

Some interesting data presented was that Pinterest’s referrals rose 60% when its Facebook app became integrated into the new timeline. Another interesting tidbit was that Goodreads daily active users (DAU) rose a whopping 77% after utilizing the open graph technology to integrate it into Facebook.

So, the rationale behind the timeline and new platform seem even more appealing to me now. However, I know many of you have been resistant to switch to the new timeline. I have bad news for you, everyone is gonna be switched to the new timeline eventually. I personally sorta cheated and created a dummy app on Facebook developers and got the new timeline many months ago, and have since grown very much accustomed to it, and love it!

For privacy freaks, take the time to fix your settings. Also, I agree with Google co-founder Eric Shmidt when he said that if you don’t want it online, you probably shouldn’t be doing it anyway.

Fun Stuff

Also, something fun today was Nokia’s freezing cold competition. They brought a massive block of ice impregnated with a brand new Nokia 701. Each person had 30 seconds to try to chisel and hack at the ice and if you get the phone dislodged, it’s yours. Unfortunately, some people hit too hard and smashed the phone. Nokia were kind enough though to hand another, functional device for the winner.