F8: Facebook Is The Portal 2.0

When Facebook announced plans to make their social network portable, I envisioned some sort of toolbar sitting in the corner of my browser, alerting me to friend updates. The reality is much cooler. At Facebook’s F8 conference on July 23, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled tools enabling Web sites to integrate Facebook profiles and friend lists deeply with their properties. For example, blog company Six Apart built a feature allowing users to append their Facebook pictures to comments on its blogs. (For more coverage see my colleague Rob Hof's live blog of the event here .) The feature employs new privacy settings from Facebook that allow users to limit how their information is shared. So, users’ photos are only shared if they proactively agree to it. “We have paid a lot of attention to making sure that… people have a lot of... [read full story]