23:56
Mr. Asim Rajput
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Life log: Timeline apps let Facebook collect stats on previous activity, like the travel log shown here. |
Facebook won the loyalty of over 800 million users largely by getting them in to the habit of visiting lots of times to see the latest updates, comments, and photographs posted by friends. Now the site will also let outside apps provide even more content, and it will encourage people to spend time looking back over activity from months or even years ago. New features introduced at an event in San Francisco last night will enable users to automatically record their eating, reading, exercise, and other habits over time, share them with friends, and review their earlier actions.
The key to the new features is an update to the Timeline page that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg introduced at his company's F8 event last September. Now, with a user's permission, third-party sites and mobile apps can record details of what the person is doing and automatically feed that knowledge to the person's Timeline page through a "Timeline app" that sends the information to Facebook and provides the necessary permission and privacy settings.
"Your timeline is not a way to tell your story based on what you are doing on Facebook, but using your activity out in the remainder of the world as well," said Carl Sjogreen, director of platform products at Facebook, at the launch event.
Fans and researchers have experimented with comprehensively logging their lives for years. In 1998, for example, Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell began trying to digitally capture as much as they could about everything they did. But Bell and others have often found that browsing and reviewing their records introduced a greater challenge than capturing them. Facebook's new design could help people do both.
Facebook's hope is not to hook in users with more experiences, but also to make use of the new trove of information that Timeline apps will provide. The knowledge could help the company's efforts to target ads more cleverly, although Facebook says that for now, information from Timeline apps is not used in that way.
The key to the new features is an update to the Timeline page that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg introduced at his company's F8 event last September. Now, with a user's permission, third-party sites and mobile apps can record details of what the person is doing and automatically feed that knowledge to the person's Timeline page through a "Timeline app" that sends the information to Facebook and provides the necessary permission and privacy settings.
"Your timeline is not a way to tell your story based on what you are doing on Facebook, but using your activity out in the remainder of the world as well," said Carl Sjogreen, director of platform products at Facebook, at the launch event.
Fans and researchers have experimented with comprehensively logging their lives for years. In 1998, for example, Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell began trying to digitally capture as much as they could about everything they did. But Bell and others have often found that browsing and reviewing their records introduced a greater challenge than capturing them. Facebook's new design could help people do both.
Facebook's hope is not to hook in users with more experiences, but also to make use of the new trove of information that Timeline apps will provide. The knowledge could help the company's efforts to target ads more cleverly, although Facebook says that for now, information from Timeline apps is not used in that way.
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