Upcoming Changes to Facebook Look Really Promising

Note: I first posted this on my Facebook account, and decided it would be good to post to a larger (hmmm, do I really have more people reading this blog than I have friends ignoring my ramblings on FB?) audience…well, ok, potentially larger, anyway.

I watched parts of Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at the F8 conference yesterday, and I liked what I saw.

So I’m not a Facebook developer, and as such I don’t yet have access to Timeline, but when I fired up Spotify this morning, it offered to connect with my Facebook account and add the things I’m listening to to my timeline (and I did it, but as I wasn’t sure what it would do, I’ve initially set it to show up for me only. (In a slightly ironic twist, I was just semi-deriding that option this morning!)).

Either Timeline’s coming very soon, or we’ll be able to have all these external data sources feeding into FB well in advance of the launch, which means it’ll come pre-populated, which is cool. It also means they’ve been thinking about this for a bit, and the recent changes have been more about the behind-the-scenes stuff needed to make this work than the up-front cosmetics.

I think that, especially as someone who’s been interested in the Memex/Gorden Bell-MyLifeBits-type projects for some time now, I’m really looking forward to see this. And if Facebook has a full export feature day one, we’re looking at a pretty useful thing.