Facebook told reporters yesterday that their seemingly annual F8 conference would not be happening this year. The reason being that Facebook hasn’t shipped a major new product this year. In fact, the company is still pushing Open Graph, which was introduced at last year’s F8 conference.

For their part, Facebook is still pushing development on the Facebook platform, but in other ways. A conference doesn’t let Zuckerberg and crew get intimate with developers. That may be why the company vouched for putting more emphasis on World Hack 2012 with more locations around the world. In fact, the Facebook crew is hosting a Hackathon in Barcelona today.

Facebook will hold other F8 conferences in the future. The developers who love gathering together and talking about the latest movements in the Facebook scene need not worry. It’s just that Facebook needs something on par or greater than Open Graph to make such an extravagant event worth the cost. The company does have to answer to investors now, and a conference without any major announcements could only hurt their market growth.

As for now, Facebook is going to keep focusing on mobile growth. They have the desktop development market squared away, but the mobile market is still an untamed frontier ripe for the taking. Facebook may be the big name in town, but a small start up could easily usurp them. The next F8 conference will undoubtedly address this potential problem.

[h/t: All Things D]

As those who appreciate privacy tackle Facebook’s new timeline feature, a true area of concern, the majority of the feedback was focused on the simple fact that Facebook introduced new features and altered the user interface to include the timeline ticker. Over on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the outspoken host had a suggestion for the next time Facebook implements some kind of site-wide alteration: a name change.

While the name change is humorous, it’s not intended for those of you who may be offended by coarse speech. Take a look at the lead image before you watch the video to get an idea of where Maher was leaning with his naming convention suggestion:

I suppose “liking” the company that provides your mobile phone service is a way of feeling complete, but one wonders how many casual Facebook users who happened to like, say, AT&T, are actively on the AT&T’s Facebook profile, hanging out with other AT&T subscribers and sharing stories of their AT&T experience. Sure, consumers will use these company profiles to air grievances, but are these corporate profiles really that crucial to the overall Facebook experience?

Considering the casual approach people have to social networking, it’s not a stretch to think Maher’s Facebook name change suggestion would home with these kinds of users.

Would you share your whole life on your Facebook wall? Let us know in the comments.

That, in a nutshell, is what the timeline is all about. Sure, it will feature your recent Facebook activity, classic “wall” material, and app-related content. There’s a lot of cool stuff happening there, but the timeline itself goes back to when you were born, containing as much information as you want to share.

It looks like you can add content extending even before your birth (notice the +. You can drag that down and add more things, entering when something happened):

However, if you try to enter something for a date before your birthday, it doesn’t let you. It just tells you you weren’t born yet, which apparently eliminates pictures of your mom’s pregnancy, and any pictures of you as a fetus. Maybe they’ll enable this later.

Post birth, you pretty much have free reign.

You can add health-related events:

Other life events:

You can add content about when you lose a loved one:

The point is, you can pretty much add anything from your life starting with birth, which means a lot of people are going to be spending a whole lot of time adding things from their lives. Or at least that appears to be Facebook’s goal.

I have no reason to believe that tons of people won’t be adding everything they can think of to make their lives look more interesting than the next guy’s. You’re going to look pretty lame if you only have a few things and everyone else is climbing mountains, sky diving and meeting presidents.

Imagine the data. Imagine the ad targeting possibilities.

Imagine that Facebook is around for the long haul, and new people are born into the world where this is just the norm. It is a pretty interesting time indeed.

All of that said, some things you might be thinking include: I wonder how many people will get fired from their jobs. I wonder how many more divorces will get blamed on Facebook. I wonder how many lives will this ruin.

Don’t worry. “You have complete control over everything on your timeline. You have control of what’s there and you also control who can see everything,” said Zuckerberg during the keynote.

Well, users have had a lot of control over what they share on Facebook in the past, but that hasn’t stopped all of those things from happening. Tread carefully. By carefully, I mean with common sense. It may not be a good idea to post about the first time you used an illegal narcotic or the affair you had a few years ago. Not that you’ve done either of those things.

If you want to sign up for the timeline feature, you can do so at the bottom of this page. It’s supposed to be rolling out over the next few weeks anyway. Greg Kumparak has a nice walkthrough on how to go about getting the timeline early if you’re a developer.

How much of your life will you share with the world? Let us know.

The story led into his announcement that Netflix is getting deep integration with Facebook’s new Timeline and Open Graph, in order to make everything more social. From the Netflix blog –

The Netflix/Facebook integration empowers you as a Netflix member to share what you watch from Netflix with your friends on Facebook and to discover what your friends are watching both on Facebook and within the Netflix user interface. This makes it easier and more fun to find new television series and movies to watch.

Sounds great, right? The only problem is that this integration will only be launching for Netflix and Facebook users outside the U.S. for now.

The Netflix integration in the States in being held up by a 1988 law called the Video Privacy Protection Act. The law basically makes it so that a person’s video rentals cannot be shared, and it’s blocking the Netflix/Facebook marriage here in America.

Right now, there is legislation already introduced in the House of Representatives to amend this decades-old law. The amendment would allow users to consent to sharing their video information online, therefore allowing the Netflix/Facebook integration to go through.

In light of this, Netflix has posted a plea on their official blog that asks customers to “Help bring Facebook sharing to Netflix USA.”

Unfortunately, we will not be offering this feature in the U.S. because a 1980’s law creates some confusion over our ability to let U.S. members automatically share the television shows and movies they watch with their friends on Facebook…

The good news, however, is that some forward-thinking members of Congress have introduced legislation, H.R. 2471, that would allow you to make this choice…

If you want the choice to share with your friends, please email congress to urge them to pass this modernizing legislation.

So, if you want to see this happen, you can email Congress through this online submission form available via Netflix.

Reed Hasting’s Facebook integration announcement was some good press in a dark couple of weeks for Netflix. Between the price increases, the loss of Starz content, and the whole Qwikster thing, they’ve really taken a hit with users and investors.

Yesterday, they also announced that they made a deal with Discovery Communications to add Discovery Channel and TLC content to their streaming catalog.

Before that, SNL’s Andy Samberg took the stage, impersonating Zuckerberg, in a follow-up to an SNL sketch that came out after The Social Network. When the real Zuck took the stage, he announced that Facebook surpassed a milestone in that last week it had half a billion people using Facebook in a single day.

The Timeline, is basically the new Facebook profile pages, which is designed to capture the user’s entire life through updates, places, music, video, pictures, and various apps. It’s certainly less boring than the profile of today. It kind of looks like what Myspace should have done.

The company announced that all kinds of music, video, news, game and lifestyle apps will be taking advantage of the new open graph, and these will be integrated into not only the news feed, but the new ticker and the timeline. Apps will cater to all kinds of actions, beyond the “like”. You will see when people are listening to music, watching videos, reviewing restaurants and all kinds of stuff.

The Timeline will be rolling out over the next few weeks. Developers working on video/music-related apps can start working on new apps for the new open graph, and everyone else can after the timeline rolls out. Zuckerberg said he wants people to get familiar with the timeline.

The following articles look more closely at Facebook’s news:

Andy Samberg Impersonates Zuckerberg, Disses Twitter

f8: Facebook Unveils Timeline

f8: Facebook Unveils Next Version of Open Graph

f8: Facebook Makes Some Big Changes, Here’s The Early Twitter Reaction

f8: Music, Video, News, Games, Lifestyle Apps

More than a dozen developers have worked with Facebook to build social music apps with the new open graph, according to Mark Zuckerberg.

“Developers are using open graph not only to rethink music, but to rethink the whole music industry, and i think Spottily has done a great job with this,” he said.

Daneil Ek CEO of Spotify took the mic for a bit. He said, “Spotify users who connect to Facebook listen to more music on a weekly basis. They also listen to a wider variety of music.”

“We have over 400 million playlists to back that up,” he added. “They’re also more engaged and more than twice as likely to pay for music.”

“It’s a big day for music and an even bigger day for the music industry,” said Ek. But it’s even a bigger day for users, he added ( or something to that effect).

Spotify has a post up about its integration.

This isn’t all about music though. Movies and music are also part of the equation of course. Hulu, Netflix and a bunch others have integrations.

There is also a video timeline. This contains movie and show info that the user has watched. It’s highlights. Not everything.

Reed Hastings CEO of Netflix took the mic to talk about how much better movie suggestions are from friends and how the new Facebook will help this. It’s already helped him watch Breaking Bad since a friend suggested it, despite the Netflix algorithm having recommended to him for a long time. Unfortunately for U.S. users there are some privacy issues preventing the new integration from being available here. For now. More on the Netlix integration here.

Then there’s news. You can see all the most popular articles that all your friends are reading across all kinds of publications. Yahoo News is using Open Graph so you can discover more news stories through your friends, Zuckerberg explained, for example.

A Yahoo spokesperson tells WebProNews, “A milestone in Yahoo!’s social strategy, the company has launched a new way for users to discover and connect with friends around the world’s most popular content on both Yahoo! and Facebook. The Yahoo! News Activity Feature is putting people’s friends front and center to usher in an innovative way of connecting around content socially.”

More on this is here.

He looked at a new app for Washington Post (social reader). He showed one for The Daily as well – a Facebook-specific canvas app. More than a dozen developers have worked with Facebook on new social apps for news.

Of course game apps are all over the new Open Graph. With the new open graph, all kinds of activities from games will appear in the ticker. There are a bunch of game partners who have already taken advantage of this as well.

Finally, there is what they’re calling “Lifestyle apps”. Zuckerberg describes lifestyle apps as apps that let you keep track of and express different things from your life. “I think that this is going to be really big,” he says.

He showed off a Nike app for running. He then showed the Foodspotting app. He says they worked with “dozens and dozens” of other partners to create other lifestyle apps for the new open graph.

More on Facebook’s new Open Graph here.

The first big change is to Facebook’s profile system. Goodbye profiles, hello Timeline. The New timeline seeks to keep track of your entire social life, from birth up to the presents. It includes everything – photos, apps, statuses and much more. More about that here.

Zuckerberg has also unveiled “Open Graph,” which “adds the verbs” according to him. Basically, this means that you no longer have to “like” everything, you simply do things. “Josh read X book,” “Josh reviewed X restaurant,” etc. More about the open graph here.

Facebook has also announced new integrations with services like Spotify and Slacker Radio.

Here’s some of the Twitter chatter about the big changes being made at Facebook –

Andy Sparks, the guy who has his timeline as the test timeline in the f8 video that Facebook is showing, has also become a Twitter trending topic -

“[We're] going to make it so you can connect to anything you want in any way you want,” he says.

Basically you don’t have to “like” everything. You can just read a book, watch a movie, eat a meal, etc. That’s the way he describes it.

You’ll start seeing things like:

Mark “reviewed” a restaurant.

“Last year we added the nouns, this year we added the verbs,” he says.

This stuff goes into ticker and timeline, but not the news feed, as to make it less annoying.

The new class of apps will focus on helping users fill out their timeline and helping users discover new things through their friends. The three ways they’ll do this, he says, will be frictionless experiences, realtime serendipity and finding patterns in friends’ activity.

Apps will be designed around things like music, movies, TV, News, Books, etc. but also around things like Exercise, Fashion, Emotions, and other lifestyle categories.

All of Facebook’s new music whisperings we’ve been hearing about are based on this. Various music services are simply taking advantage (like Spotify, Slacker Radio and others). You can listen to songs at the same time your friend is, with the track synced up.

There is a music timeline view on people’s timelines where you can see your friends’ musical tastes.

“Tell the whole story of your life on a single page,” he says. The official description says:

Timeline is wider than your old profile, and it’s a lot more visual. The first thing you’ll notice is the giant photo right at the top. This is your cover, and it’s completely up to you which of your photos you put here.

As you scroll down past your cover, you’ll see your posts, photos and life events as they happened in time. You choose what’s featured on your timeline. You can star your favorites to double their size or hide things altogether.

Everything you’ve shared recently is right there, then you can go back in time by clicking on specific year, where you can find “the most important stuff”. The timeline has dots that show important content when highlighted.

“We wanted to design a place that feels like your home,” says Zuckerberg. “A place you’re proud to call your home.”

You can go back and insert things from your life that are missing. You can put a big photo of your choice at the top. This is separate from your profile.

“You have complete control over everything on your timeline. You have control of what’s there and you also control who can see everything,” he says.

There is also a private activity log. “This is where you’ll find everything you shared since you joined Facebook,” the company says. “Click on any post to feature it on your timeline so your friends can see it, too.”

You can also add apps to your timeline.

It will be available in a few weeks.

Key joke: “Take a crazy big number 2, don’t share it with your friends….that’s for Twitter.”

Pretty sure he was reading a teleprompter.

Then Zuckerberg came out and was like “What are you doing? I’m Mark Zuckerberg. You’re Andy Samberg from SNL.”

Pretty much a rehash of when Zuck was on SNL.

It wasn’t very funny.