New Facebook feature explores future visions of sharing

Facebook on Thursday introduced a new feature called Open Graph, enabling users to access and share a wide range of media and lifestyle content on the social network site. According to Facebook's chief executive officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg, Open Graph lets users share what they are doing in Facebook-connected apps as they are doing it. These social apps focus on media apps including books, news, music, TV, movies and games, as well as lifestyle apps such as exercise, food, fashion and travel. "The last five years of social networking have been about getting people signed up, and getting people connected with their lives. The next five years are going to be defined by the apps and depth of engagement," the young CEO said in a keynote speech at Facebook's f8 developer conference. Take music for example, Facebook integrates with European music streaming service Spotify. If one's Spotify account is connected to Facebook, a message will show up in the Ticker stating the song one is listening to and in the Timeline, a new design of one's profile page. The friends of the user can listen to the same song at the same time by hovering mouse over the song in Timeline or Ticker. Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek and movie streaming service Netflix CEO Reed Hastings also took stage as guest speakers to introduce their partnership with Facebook. Zuckerberg also introduced social news reading applications from major news organizations such as The Washington Post and Yahoo News, which allow users to access the content directly on Facebook. Earlier at the f8 conference, Timeline was unveiled as a new feature. It is a new profile design allowing users to scroll vertically through the big moments of one's life in a single page. Zuckerberg assured users that they have complete control over their Timeline, saying they can decide what content will appear and who can see it. The new feature will be available in a few weeks. Since Google launched its own social network "Google+" in June, Facebook has been in a combat mode, striving to roll out new products and features to beat the search giant. In his keynote speech on Thursday, Zuckerberg said half a billion people now use Facebook every day. Two days before the f8 conference, Google announced to open its social network to the public, noting it has introduced 100 new features in the three-month trial.