The cat is out of the bag that Facebook is going to launch something big at its developer conference f8 this week. We’ve heard about the social music services that could be debuting in a few days, but as the New York Times conveyed this past weekend, Facebook is planning for ways to surface personal content better. And we’ve heard from a source that Facebook will introduce new buttons on the wall that will begin introducing some granularity to the “Like” concept. We’re told these new buttons are “Read,” “Listened,” “Watched.” The network will also soon launch new social commerce buttons like “Want” following the introductions of the aforementioned buttons.
It’s important to qualify that this is from a source (and not from Facebook) but from what we hear, Facebook users will be able to click Read, Listened, Watched on content in their news feed. And soon, “Want” as well.
And it’s unclear what will happen to the Like button and how these new buttons will affect the Like button. And we don’t know what Facebook will do with this data, but there is so much the network could do with the data from these buttons. It seems pretty obvious that ad targeting would be a huge opportunity as well as the capability of delivering a more personalized experience for users. Not to mention that brands, retailers, entertainment companies and other businesses will be able to gain segmented data around the Like.
If all of this is starting to sound a bit like Facebook’s infamous Beacon project, it shouldn’t be too surprising — from what we’ve heard a key part of these new Facebook features is to provide Beacon-like functionality in terms of auto-populating News Feed stories based around intent and actions. But they’ll do so without the advertising and privacy ramifications. At least for now…
The introduction of these new, granular buttons would certainly add more depth to content surfaced by media sharing apps as well as from retailers, which is in line with previous reports of what’s being launched. We’ll keep you updated on what else we hear is in the pipeline for f8 (and we know what’s not being announced: Project Spartan).
Update: Liz Gannes is reporting that the motto for f8 will be “Read. Watch. Listen.” — that sounds exactly in line with the buttons we’ve heard about.
PowerInbox lets email users run applications inside Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Outlook. The startup, which launches Tuesday, is also announcing that it raised $1.1 million in a funding round led by Atlas Venture.
At launch, PowerInbox includes email applications for Facebook, Twitter and Groupon. Each app brings it with it the ability to view and engage with site content from inside the email message.
“Email hasn’t really changed in its last 40 years of existence,” PowerInbox founder and CEO Matt Thazhmon tells Mashable. “Looking ten years in the future, I’ll put money on it, email will still have Reply, ReplyAll and Forward, but next to those buttons, you will see an edit button and an app store button … This is the future of email that we are working hard towards and our launch today is the first step towards making this vision a reality.”
Stock notification emails come to life with the PowerInbox browser extension installed. A Groupon deal email includes a live countdown on time left to buy, and indicates whether the deal has tipped. A Facebook notification email displays photos, comments and Likes, and allows the user to comment from inside the message. A Twitter follower notification lets you follow back, tweet inside the message and view the person’s recent tweet.
PowerInbox users can expect apps for managing Netflix movies, bidding on eBay auctions, booking flights and playing casual games.
Developers are also encouraged to build their own email applications, and Thazhmon says that startup is fielding a lot of interest from the developer community.
PowerInbox has raised $1.1 million from Atlas Venture, Longworth Ventures, Correlation Ventures and several Angel investors.
Almost as viral as the latest Facebook scam are the warnings users have been posting to each other since the beginning of the weekend.
It’s similar to many previous scams that we’ve covered in that it leverages a javascript exploit to automatically spam a user’s friends’ walls. As ZDNet previously covered, the scam resulted in users posting something which states “Facebook now has a dislike button! Click ‘Enable Dislike Button’ to turn on the new feature”.
A link from the application then drove users to a page which offered some Javascript that they were instructed to place in their browser address bar.
When searching for other people who have fallen for the scam, we found numerous people warning each other about it instead — yet that isn’t preventing many folks from reposting the dislike button spiel despite all the warnings.
I haven’t been able to find the original scam at this point since so many people are warning others about it. However, if you see your friends posting about the dislike button, make sure to let them know that it isn’t real!
“Like” concept. We’re told these new buttons are “Read,” “Listened,” “Watched.” The network will also soon launch new social commerce buttons like “Want” following the introductions of the aforementioned buttons.
I love infographics about Facebook, including this one showing gender and age balance on Facebook versus other social media sites.
