Top 3 Takeaways from the Facebook f8 Conference Last Week

Facebook announced a bunch of new features at last week's Facebook f8 conference, such as Timeline, the ticker tape, deals with music and other media sites and so on. While these announcements are interesting on their own,  there are deeper things going on under the covers which I believe are even more important. 

Here are the 3 things that stuck in my mind:

1. 800 Million Users: They announced that they now have 800 million users (and recently had a day when 500 million logged in during the day). That's more than 11% of all humanity! This has many implications, and here are some that struck me as significant: a) Any simple change they do now has the potential to affect a large enough fraction of humanity to have a meaningful impact not just inside Facebook, but in the real world. b)  On the other hand, this number means that if they make a mistake which, say, leads to every user wasting 1 second of their time due to being confused / distracted or just being delayed, that amounts to about 25 man-years worth of wasted time! That's a big responsibility! c) Also, I assume they will now have to switch focus from acquiring more users to making the network richer. Richer user experience, more engagement, more services / apps, richer analytics etc. This brings us to points 2 and 3 below.
2. More Nouns and Verbs: Now you can say things like "I am listening to X" instead of just "I like X". And this can be done without you having to explicitly take an action (such as clicking on a button).This obviously is a lot more useful and meaningful because a) now you have a richer vocabulary of things you can track, b) the event generation will be more exhaustive because no user action is necessary, and most importantly, c) now you can track what people actually do (more or less) rather than just what they say or claim to do. The resulting richness, completeness, and authenticity of information about user behavior has tremendous value, not just to advertizers, but to all businesses involved in general.
3. Universal Logging and Analysis: The new platform will allow all kinds of apps and services to send  streams of events such as those mentioned above to Facebook and Facebook will be able to log them and analyze them looking for patterns. This makes Facebook world's primary logging and analysis service. Potentially, anything that happens anywhere in the world could be logged and analyzed in one place. Needless to say, the importance of something like this simply can not be understated. 

Even just one of the above would be revolutionary in terms of potential impact. Taken together, possibilities are simply mind boggling. I will blog about some of these possibilities in future posts.