The new verbs include three new fitness actions (run, walk, bike), four new book-related actions (read, rate, quote, want to read), and two new video actions (rate, want to watch) to open graph.

What can you do with Actions?

The new actions help you share what you’re doing in a very precise way and enable apps to share updates for your automatically. (In fact, you may have heard of this first when Facebook announced “frictionless sharing.”)

Connected apps — like a Kobo reader, for instance — use Facebook actions to update Facebook on, not surprisingly, your actions. In the same way, Nike+ can tell your Facebook friends that you’re running, or that you’ve just finished a 10K slog.

That’s cool, but why does Facebook care? And what makes this important?

What can Facebook do with Actions?

For many, perhaps most, status updates, Facebook doesn’t really have a clue what you’re actually doing. You said something like “Visiting my mother-in-law for the first time – wish me luck,” and Facebook can’t really parse through those words to understand it like a human would.

But when you use Facebook actions, Facebook knows what your status update actually means.

That’s because Facebook actions are structured updates that not only provide information on what you’re doing or have done, like any standard status update would, but also provide meta-data about what precisely it is. In other words, since computers are stupid, they have to be first told the message, and second told what it means.

Facebook has called Actions the “building blocks of Open Graph,” and Open Graph is nothing less than an attempt to actually understand you at a deep level … and your friends, and your interactions.

There’s money in them hills

Google monetizes incredibly well because its massively popular search engine has built-in intent: When you’re searching for something, you include keywords about what you want, and Google can determine with fairly high accuracy what your meaning and intent is, and then match it to commercially relevant information.

Aka, ads.

Facebook monetizes poorly because there’s seldom built-in commercial intent in social status updates, and because it’s less clear what they’re actually about.

As VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell wrote last year:

Actions are kind of the holy grail of semantic data, defining relation types between people, objects, content, places, businesses, and so much more. If users warm to the idea of Actions, it might also be one of the most valuable and lucrative move Facebook will ever make.

Naturally, Facebook’s messaging around Actions is all consumer-focused: They’ll allow people to “capture memories” and “share experiences” and “express” themselves. And they will.

But they’ll also make Facebook a great deal smarter.

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Facebook has launched a new set of actions to help app developers and Facebook members post about things they are doing, such as reading books, watching a movie, or biking.

The move today follows Facebook’s announcement yesterday that it has revamped the News Feed with larger photos and a cleaner layout.

Actions were rolled out in January 2012 as a new way for apps, content, and brands to interact with Facebook’s Open Graph. The Open Graph already supports a variety of popular activities, but now the list gets a bit bigger with nine more common verbs.

“This improves developers’ capability to publish the types of activities that people want to share,” Facebook wrote today in a blog post.

Here are the new actions:

For fitness: run, walk, bike
For books: read, rate, quote, want to read
For movies and TV: rate, want to watch

Some examples of apps that will be using these actions include:

Fitness: Cyclemeter, Endomondo, Jawbone UP, Log Your Run, MapMyRun, Nike, Runkeeper, Runmeter, Runtastic, SPLIT Multisport GPS, Walkmeter
Books: Bookshout!, GoodReads, Kobo, BookScout
Movies and TV: Rotten Tomatoes, Hulu, Flixster, Fandango, Crackle

Today, Facebook announced a new treat for developers: the capability to use something called “flexible sentences” when their apps communicate with Facebook on your behalf.

Already, apps can use fairly descriptive language in Open Graph. For example, RunKeeper can tell the world you ran 15.1 miles; Goodreads can share that you read two books and added Twilight: Breaking Dawn to your bookshelf. But flexible sentences take app communications to a whole new level of specificity.

With flexible sentences, as Facebooker Jiangbo Miao explained today on the company blog, apps can now use better language to describe what in-app actions actually do (e.g., Songkick lets you “track” bands, but what does a “track” really mean? Now, Songkick can post to your profile that you “tracked Def Leppard to get concert alerts”).

Also, devs can use flexible sentences to avoid awkward sentence construction. In the new feature’s documentation, Facebook gives an example for a social hiking app. Steve could hike a specific path called Dead Man’s Trail, and Social Hike could post to his wall, “Steve hiked Dead Man’s Trail on Social Hiking.” But if no path is specified, the app might post, “Steve hiked a hike on Social Hiking.” With flexible sentences, devs will now have more options to smooth out those rough edge cases, such as construction, tenses, and attribution (e.g., “via”/”on”/”in” Social Hiking):

Basically, developers are getting more options and richer syntax for letting their apps programmatically talk to Facebook. The statements apps make on your profile can now be more descriptive, interesting, accurate, and human.

“Most stories will continue to be worded properly without needing to use flexible sentences,” a Facebook spokesperson said. This functionality is only available for custom actions and will not work with built-in actions, which are intended to provide a consistent experience across all instances. If you modify your existing actions, you will need to resubmit your actions for approval via the App Dashboard.

Flexible sentences is available today for developers, and we’re beginning to rollout the new story formats for users. To learn more about working with flexible sentences, please see our documentation.

Facebook first announced Actions, its big plan to bring verbs other than “Like” to the Facebook news feed, back at f8 in September 2011. At that time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the network’s vocabulary was limited and previewed some other activities that would be shared on Facebook in the future — listening to music, reading books, watching TV shows, hiking trails. A lot more than just “liking.”

It’s a small update, but it’s one that will make both developers and grammarians alike a little bit happier.

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Facebook announced today at Parisian tech conference LeWeb that Facebook.com was home to more than 350 applications with more than 1 million active monthly users each.

In a panel onstage, Facebooker Justin Osofsky also said Platform has been integrated with more than 200,000 iOS and Android mobile apps. When it comes to the big money-makers, Osofsky wrote this morning on the company blog, nine of the 10 top money-making iPhone apps are Facebook-integrated, and almost half of the top 400 iPhone and iPad apps use Facebook Platform.

Of course, there was a bit of light pandering to LeWeb’s heavily European crowd of entrepreneurs, developers, and technology enthusiasts. Osofsky mentioned to the audience that Paris is the number-two city in the world when it comes to Open Graph submissions for Timeline apps (don’t worry, San Francisco; you’re still number one). Also, he said that 40 percent of all submissions for Timeline apps come from developers in Europe.

A lot of Platform activity is the direct result of announcements Facebook made ages ago at its developer conference in 2011. At that time, Mark Zuckerberg told the audience about Facebook’s biggest-ever changes: all new Timeline-based profiles, functionality for listening to music with friends, wildly better graphic interfaces across the site, and something called Actions.

Actions represented an all new way for developers, brands, and publishers to interact with Facebook users, and by using Actions and integrating with Timeline, many app developers began to see huge bumps in user activity, from new signups to app engagement.

Given all that and the fact that the social network is now, at one billion users and still growing, the largst of its kind, it’s not too surprising that developers are putting Facebook first when building their apps — no more surprising than the fact that many developers are putting mobile first. They’re fishing where the fish are.

Top image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell

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Facebook is rolling out Developer Alerts, a way for developers to keep tabs on their Facebook apps via email and Facebook notifications.

The new alerts cover a range of key communiques, such as notifications of upcoming API changes, status updates for new app submissions, and communications about the social network’s policies.

The whole system is part of Facebook’s recent wave of attempts to give developers what they need and specifically request. In this case, the company said devs were asking for more and better communication.

“Most developers won’t receive alerts very frequently, but when you do we hope you find them a helpful way to understand and track issues with your app,” writes Facebooker Min-Young Wu today on the company blog.

“We’re beginning to roll this out to apps today and plan to enable it for all apps in the coming weeks.”

Special alerts will go out when Facebook is planning changes that might break your app. You’ll get notifications 90, 60, and 30 days before the change goes into effect until you’ve enabled the necessary migration.

For clarity’s sake, app alerts are going to be threaded by issue and will include links if you need to get more information or take an action. Notifications will also be sent out when an issue is resolved.

Top image courtesy of Hasloo Group Production Studio, Shutterstock

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Facebook has just announced its new Shared Activity plug-in, a tool that lets you manage who sees what you’re doing on Facebook-connected apps.

Best of all, it’s a one-click process. You don’t have to navigate into the bowels of your Facebook profile to find it; in fact, the social network designed it so you can manage your privacy settings even when you’re not on Facebook.com.

Imagine you’re browsing around your favorite news site, ILoveBieber.com. You’ve previously logged into the site using your Facebook profile, because once you’re logged in, you get to play social games with Justin Bieber themes, and how fun is that? But you’re not sure you want everyone on your Facebook friends list to see your activity, so you check the site’s Shared Activity plug-in, which is already hovering in the bottom left corner of the screen, nice and obvious, and you click “No one” on the drop-down menu of groups to share with.

On Facebook’s developer blog, Facebooker Andrew Chen writes, “The Shared Activity plug-in lists a person’s activities published from your app to Facebook including Open Graph activities, Like button stories, and comment plugin activities.

“For example, when an individual uses a music app, she could modify the privacy settings, through the plug-in, for specific song listening activities, without needing to go back to Facebook to control what’s shown. Similarly, if a person, through a travel app, likes a restaurant or reviews a hotel, and decides that these activities should only be viewable to a select group on friends on Facebook, he can control this within the plugin as well.”

In the documentation, Facebook lets devs specify a size and typeface for the plug-in and then generates the code automatically.

The controls are extremely granular and easy to use. As the Open Graph grows, it’s good to see that Facebook is encouraging developers to think carefully about privacy management and is giving devs tools to make that task easy for users.

Top image courtesy of CandyBox Images, Shutterstock

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Facebook and fitness. Who knew these two seemingly disparate pursuits would blend so magically together? But fitness apps (and social competition in fitness activities) have seen huge growth since app developers got access to Facebook’s Open Graph.

Due to Open Graph integration with apps from Nike, RunKeeper, Garmin, and many others, we lowly Facebook users are starting to humblebrag (or just regular-brag) about our real-world fitness exploits.

For example, my brother and dad are both really into running and biking — the longer the distance, the faster the mileage, the better. Nowadays, I can’t log onto Facebook without seeing one or both of them posting via a third-party app a highly detailed update about their latest run or ride, including the exact route, time of day, and elevation changes.

And one of my favorite online friends has recently picked up running as a new hobby and is already making huge strides (pun intended), booking it around Virginia in high temperatures and for long distances. Her Facebook feed is full of hilarious jokes about the training experience as well as lots of support and encouragement from friends.

So, as fitness becomes one of the more popular things we’re all talking about on Facebook, fitness app-makers are seeing a lot of growth. It’s kind of a chicken-egg question: Do we talk about exercise on Facebook because we have the apps, or did devs make the apps because they realized everyone was talking about exercise on Facebook anyway?

That we may never know. What we do know, thanks to a new Facebook Developers blog post today, is that the Nike+ Running app saw a 77 percent increase in traffic after integrating Facebook Open Graph. And mobile training app Endomondo saw traffic grow more than 150 percent after plugging into the Open Graph. RunKeeper and Runtastic each saw a 25 percent traffic bump.

The best practices these early-adopting Open Graph fitness apps have to offer are simple and, one would think, obvious: Use Facebook for logins. Show a map for outdoor activity statuses. Let users tag their friends. Let users post about their achievements, not just their activities.

These apps all integrated with Open Graph back in March, when the whole idea of “actions” came into play for third-party Facebook developers. Facebook said other fitness apps, such as Livestrong, MapMyRun and MapMyRide, are still just getting started.

But one thing’s for certain: As much as Facebook wants to keep you glued to its fascinating pages for hours on end, it’s also becoming easier to leave Facebook behind and plug your other, real-world activities into Facebook while you’re on the go. Ergo, even though you’re leaving the website itself, it’s still becoming more ubiquitous by the minute.

Image courtesy of Ljupco Smokovski, Shutterstock

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Facebook announced today it’s giving developers a new toy: the capability to tag a user’s Facebook friends in an off-Facebook app.

This is how it works: In your food-picture-taking app, Bob the User might snap a picture of his macaroni and write an update like, “LOL this looks like Alice.” If you’ve got the mention features for Open Graph all wired up, Alice, Bob’s Facebook friend, would then be tagged in that post. In addition to showing up on Bob’s timeline, the post would also appear in Alice’s Facebook timeline, and Alice would receive a notification about it.

Inside an app, it’ll look something like the image on the right.

This is different from action tagging, which is only used when Facebook friends perform a specific action together (i.e., “Randi Zuckerberg checked in at Palo Alto Grill with Jessica Somebody”).

This change is a big boon for developers who are using Facebook Open Graph as a way to boost adoption and engagement. Friend-tagging features that can spread across Facebook means potentially huge numbers of new users being exposed to your app via the most trustworthy source of all — their nearest, dearest Facebook buddies.

“This new feature is ideal for situations when people are doing activities where they want to reference friends,” writes Facebooker Cindy Li today on the company blog.

“For example, people want to mention friends when they share a special song, call a particular friend’s attention to a great movie or restaurant, or describe a photo that includes a friend.”

Facebook isn’t making any privacy changes for the new feature; privacy settings users already have for tagging will apply.

To bring the magic of mention tagging to your app, you can resubmit your actions and request approval for both “user messages” and “tags” with specifics (including reproduction steps) on how you plan to use mention tagging. It’s all right here in the documentation, son.

“We’re happy to bring support for mention tagging to Open Graph and can’t wait to see all the new use cases this enables,” Li said.

Top image courtesy of flydragon, Shutterstock

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Facebook did a fair amount of internal testing before it unleashed Timeline on the world, and its engineers also tested out how apps would be able to access and publish to Timeline.

But instead of dogfooding Open Graph features with songs listened to, books read, or TV shows watched, they took a much nerdier route. Internal Facebook Open Graph apps include code commit trackers, design-sharing tools, and even a Pokémon catcher.

“The people who work here love building things, and that combined with our long-held culture of ‘dogfooding’ made the advent of the Open Graph a perfect opportunity for engineers to learn the platform and have some fun at the same time,” said a Facebook rep in an email to VentureBeat today. “Many of these apps were created at hackathons, which is a time when engineers often build some of their more playful projects.”

Throughout the testing/hacking/dogfooding process, Facebooker Paul Tarjan wrote on the company blog today, “We learned that it’s really important to think hard about how you want to model your objects and actions at the beginning.”

Just like the timeline apps you and I use, these apps rely on structured data to fill out the user’s Timeline with brief, scannable, interesting summaries of app activity.

The difference is the content. Our apps might tell the world, “Jolie biked 25 miles this week,” or “Chrissy read six books this month.” Internally, a Facebook engineer’s timeline might say, “Alex checked in 2,415 lines of code,” or it might show a thumbnail gallery of interface mockups a designer created that week. And the content comes from apps only used internally at Facebook, from the company’s Phabricator code review software to its Stay Fit workout tracker.

As for the Pokémon catcher, that’s just hackers hacking. Facebook has its own Asana-like task managment software, and every time someone completes a task, they “catch” a Pokémon. Timelines for Facebookers now also aggregate stories about the Pokémon you’ve caught.

Aside from being good, clean fun, building these kinds of Open Graph apps let Facebook’s engineers experience and work out a lot of Timeline bugs before the doors were opened to third-party developers.

“Facebook depends on employee ‘dogfooding’ as a major source of feedback, so as the engineers built on Open Graph and encountered bugs, they were able to directly fix existing issues and gain perspective that helped them improve Open Graph as a whole and relate to developers building on it,” the spokesperson told us.

Also, Tarjan noted in the post, these nerdy apps are being shown off to inspire devs to create Open Graph apps for whatever is important in their own lives, whether that’s tasks completed, books read, or something entirely new that Facebook Timeline hasn’t seen yet.

Here’s what some of the internal Facebook timeline apps look like:

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The news comes via Developer Tom Waddington, who found a Want button in the Facebook Javascript developer kit. Only compatible with objects marked as products, the button would allow users to list on Facebook things they might want to buy rather than just things that they like.

At the beginning of the year, Facebook announced that with Actions, the Open Graph would start containing a lot more verbs — and a lot more structured data along with it. It all plays into Facebook’s larger plan to create interesting, informative Timelines for each user, profiles that give a picture of who you are through scanable summaries from apps you use.

With a Want button — or really, with any Facebook-linked action that ties to structured data about products – companies have a very clear and accurate way to gauge consumer interest. That two million people want an iPhone tells Apple and its advertisers quite a bit: Not only will companies be able to measure appreciation (Like!) but now desire (Want!). A “Want” button removes all ambiguity and ties into the interest graph trend that’s been blowing up since Pinterest came on the scene.

“We’re always testing new Platform features; however, we have nothing new to announce,” a Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat in a statement.

Photo: Ricardo Bilton

What were you doing at 9:30 a.m. Eastern? You certainly weren’t ringing the NASDAQ’s opening bell as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was doing. But what Zuck did simultaneously is perhaps even cooler.

click to enlarge

To celebrate the once-in-a-lifetime, historic moment, Zuckerberg posted a status update like no other to Facebook.

“Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on NASDAQ. — with Chris Cox and 4 others,” reads Zuckerberg’s Friday morning update (see screenshot to the right).

The unusual status update went live right as Zuckerberg rang the opening bell, which can only mean that the social network configured the update especially for today’s special occasion. To do so, engineers used Facebook’s Open Graph API, which lets developers create custom actions, like “read a book,” “listened to a song,” or, in this case, “listed a company.”

In fact, clever Facebook engineers actually “hacked” the NASDAQ button to post the update, goes the story told by David Garcia, a senior software engineer at Facebook, on TechCrunch.

“We hooked up our hack to run at exactly the same time as Mark pushed the button to turn on the light and ring the bell. Then we attached a wire that hooks to the hack and into the headset jack of a cell phone,” Garcia said. “When the button was pressed, it sent a signal through the hack, and the phone got the signal that triggered the custom action through our Open Graph API, posting a story onto Mark’s Timeline. It worked.”

Facebook yesterday priced its shares at $38 apiece for a $104 billion valuation. The social network will raise $16 billion (up to $18.4 billion with its over-allotment option) in its long-awaited initial public offering on the NASDAQ later today. Shares are expected to begin trading around 11 a.m. Eastern today.

Read more about Facebook’s IPO

• Facebook sets $38 share price for largest tech IPO in U.S. history
• Facebook’s all-night hackathon kicks off with standing ovation for CEO
• Facebook’s world takeover by the numbers
• Facebook is breaking these three records with its IPO
• Watch Facebook’s historic IPO live on the NASDAQ’s website
• Why Facebook’s GM ad drama won’t impact this IPO

These links will allow viewers to do specific tasks related to the post or app, and they’re not limited to Facebook’s built-in action types — Read, Listen, and Watch. For example, you can now “Fave this Product” for a Fab.com post, which will add something you see on a friend’s feed to your own Fab.com list. Some other early examples include “Save this Place” on Foursquare and “Save this Recipe” for a cooking app. When you click the link, you will complete the action and also post a story on your timeline/feed/ticker telling all of your friends that you did so. That won’t be annoying at all.

“Action links tie one action to another, and can be part of any Open Graph story.” Facebook software engineer Alex Wyler said in a post announcing the new feature. “Developers can designate an action link for any action they define, which will then appear throughout Facebook.”

Developers who want to start making their own action links can check out the documentation page for instructions.

Fresh after receiving a vote of confidence from Silicon Valley venture firms and rocketing to fame through Facebook, social video application Viddy is getting the red-carpet treatment from Hollywood.

Singers Shakira and Jay-Z and actor Will Smith join other high-profile entertainment and technology types as investors and partners in the Los Angeles-based company, Viddy announced Monday.

Viddy is the short-and-sweet, shoot-and-share video application for iPhone that has experienced a remarkable uptick in usage and new users since it integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph platform for Timeline and Ticker in February.

The one-year-old company, which surpassed 4.5 million users 11 days ago, now has more than 10 million registered users and is adding 300,000 new users per day. The company partly attributes its recent rapid user growth to its status as the number one free app on Apple’s App Store, a place it’s held for nearly a week.

Now Hollywood has come a-calling. Will Smith’s Overbook Entertainment and Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, along with Shakira, skateboarder Rob Dyrdek, soccer star Gerard Pique, and Skull Candy chairman Jeff Kearl have all invested or partnered with Viddy, the company revealed today. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, ShoeDazzle founder Brian Lee, and Omniture founder Josh James have also hopped on Viddy’s bandwagon.

In a rather odd move, the startup is not disclosing which of the heavy-hitters are investors and which are merely partners, nor is it going on the record with how much funding it has raised — but the latter we can determine for ourselves.

In Viddy’s Form D, filed Feb. 12, the company indicated that it had sold $5.75 million of a $6 million Series A offering. And a company spokesperson told VentureBeat that, ”This group expressed interest in participation toward the completion of Viddy’s Series A round in February.”

We can deduce then that the new investors pooled together the remaining $250,000 to fill out the round.

As Viddy sits comfortably in the top spot at Apple’s App Store, continues to spread on Facebook, and has the backing of celebrities, we can well ask if the app now has what it takes to achieve Instagram-like success.

Photo credit: Thomas Hawk/Flickr

Facebook's Sam Lessin using Viddy

Hang on to your seats, kids. An application for shooting and sharing pretty little videos is rocketing through Facebook and picking up new users at whirlwind speed.

Social video app Viddy added 300,000 new users yesterday, bringing its total to more than 4.5 million, the Los Angeles-based company told VentureBeat.

“Following the launch of Viddy’s Facebook Timeline app two months ago, we have seen significant growth in web-based usership, and just yesterday [we] surpassed 300,000 sign-ups in less than a 24-hour period, a new record on our one-year anniversary,” co-founder and CEO Brett O’Brien told VentureBeat.

Viddy, one of several video apps vying to reach Instagram-type celebrity with mobile phone owners, offers iPhone users a simple way to shoot, edit, and share video clips. The application has shot up Apple’s App Store charts and currently holds the number nine spot on the top free apps list. It’s also the number two free photo/video app, second only to Instagram.

“Just over a year ago we saw a huge opportunity to help people create, edit, and share videos using the capabilities of smartphones,” O’Brien said. “Then the success of Instagram really got a lot of people thinking about how they could not just make photos more beautiful, but video too. This is how a lot of people found Viddy, we were already there when Instagram really took off.”

But as sexy and sparkly as the Viddy iPhone app is, it owes much of its newfound success to Facebook. The startup enmeshed itself within Facebook’s Open Graph platform two months ago, fully integrating its app with Timeline and Ticker to allow for more seamless sharing, and it’s come out a big winner.

More than 1.7 million people have navigated over from the social network to join Viddy since February, and the startup is now signing up an average of 150,000 new users per day. It has also tabulated well over 15 million interactions with Viddy content on Facebook for the same period.

You’ve heard variations of this “Timeline bump” story before. Viddy joins a smattering of startups and app makers who have seen remarkable — dare I say, mind-blowing — returns following their integration with Facebook’s Open Graph.

In February, one-year-old Viddy closed a $6 million round of funding for a total of $8.2 million to date. From the looks of things, it was money well spent.

Less than two weeks after a relaunch featuring deeper ties to Facebook, music video service Vevo is seeing a record number of video views per person and is now netting 3.5 billion total views a month.

Vevo, the independent music video company created in partnership with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and the Abu Dhabi Media Company, has seen video views per person jump 70 percent and Facebook sharing climb 100 percent since its March 9 relaunch, CEO Rio Caraeff said in a video interview with paidContent.

The video service, which is now attracting 45 billion views a year, also plans to expand beyond the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. to six additional countries in 2012 and is seeing the fastest growth on mobile and tablet devices, Caraeff said.

The new Vevo experience, seen on web, mobile, and television (by way of a new Xbox application), is rich with Facebook-infused personalization features. When you log in via Facebook, for instance, the service scans your Facebook activity to create playlists from shared or “liked” artists and tracks.

It’s a rather brilliant integration that takes advantage of Facebook users’ previous listening actions and provides the easiest way yet to sit back and stream. Of course, since the entire experience exists on top of Facebook’s Open Graph, video viewing behaviors are pushed back to Facebook, creating a powerful, viral loop that Vevo is clearly noticing.

Vevo is just one of many companies feeling the Facebook effect. Pinterest, Viddy, Foodspotting, and several others are all noticing remarkable upticks in activity and new users since releasing applications on Facebook’s new Open Graph platform.

Vevo, according to paidContent, made $150 million in revenue in 2011 and has paid out $100 million in royalties in the last two years. Thirty percent of video consumption in the U.S. is now happening off of YouTube, Caraeff said.

Think Digg is deader than a doornail? Think again. The news aggregation site is showing new signs of life and has Facebook to thank for its recent resuscitation.

Digg’s pageviews jumped 35 percent in January, and the struggling company saw its highest traffic numbers since October 2010, software engineer Will Larson said in a blog post Friday.

Why the sizable swell? Facebook, by way of the Digg Social Reader application, is bringing new readers to the site. In January, Facebook referral traffic was up by 67 percent, Larson indicated

In late December, the flailing startup introduced the Open Graph application, which is akin to the Washington Post Social Reader or the Yahoo Social Bar. Digg Social Reader stimulates story-sharing on Digg and on Facebook. Once installed, Facebook members can automatically share their Digg-reading activities with friends and subscribers on the social network. The application also hooks into Facebook Ticker and Timeline for more visibility.

The new blood is a much-needed infusion of hope for Digg. 2010 and 2011 were rocky years for the site that was once the angel of traffic for many a media company and blogger. Digg, which launched in 2004, quickly lost relevance with online news readers as Reddit swooped in to take its place. A poorly received redesign and the loss of its once revered leader seemed like sure signs that death was to become its doom.

Can Facebook help Digg forge a full-fledged comeback? The jury is still out, but the company is paying close attention to the reading behaviors of its newest Facebook fans.

“As compared to stories read on Digg (without Digg Social Reader turned on) — there are two main differences,” Larson detailed. “Entertainment stories were 14 percent of all stories read but less than 4 percent of those added to the Timeline. Likewise, political stories comprise less than two percent of those added to a user’s Timeline but close to 10 percent of what people read. The differences are significant enough to begin to predict a new type of reading behavior.”

And Digg is not alone in noticing the unique behaviors of Facebook readers. Yahoo, which introduced the Social Bar last year, has also seen a surge in new readership — especially in the highly coveted youth category — and is happily hitching its news product to Facebook to ride the wave back to relevancy.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Our creepy, socially-networked future.

If Facebook files its paperwork for an initial public offering this week, as many expect it to do, we’ll be on the road to one of the biggest tech IPOs in recent history.

The offering will probably raise $10 billion in cash for the company and will value Facebook at somewhere between $75 and $100 billion, making founder Mark Zuckerberg, who holds an estimated 24 percent of the company, a billionaire many times over. That valuation is not far off the implied valuation of about $80 billion that the company currently has on secondary market Sharespost.

It’ll likely be priced to pop, unlike Zynga’s IPO. In other words, the underwriters will set a share price that’s slightly lower than what they figure the true market valuation will be, so the stock will pop up to its “natural” level on the first day of trading, like an air balloon held underwater and then suddenly released.

But, like a balloon, what happens to Facebook next will depend on many factors.

We don’t yet have access to detailed financial data about Facebook — that will come when the company files its S-1 forms — but here are some things we do know about the company.

400 million people use Facebook every day.

Facebook claims it has 800 million registered users worldwide, and that half of them check into the site every day. It won’t be long before the company reaches a billion customers which is a milestone few other companies have reached. Microsoft, Nokia, and Walmart have probably done it — though they all have a billion paying customers, whereas Facebook’s registered users don’t pay to use the service, they just provide the attention that advertisers pay Facebook for.

Still, paying customers or not, 400 million is a lot of people. Social networks have come and gone, as the party moved from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook, but no social networking company has ever reached this volume. That alone is significant.

Facebook has more than twice as many U.S. users than Google did at its IPO.

VentureBeat contributor Rocky Agrawal points out that Facebook now has 100 million more U.S. users than Google did at the time of that company’s IPO. In December, Facebook had 162.5 million unique users in the U.S., according to Comscore Media Metrix. By contrast, Google had 61.9 million when it went public in August, 2004. Google was then the No. 4 web property, Agrawal points out — the same position Facebook now holds.

According to Comscore, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all attract more unique U.S. visitors each month. But the web is a lot bigger now than it was in 2004, so Facebook is starting with a much bigger pool of regular users than Google had in 2004.

When I spoke to a group of about 70 high school students recently, every single one of them raised their hand when asked if they were on Facebook. When someone asked if anyone was not on Facebook, only two people raised their hands — and they were both teachers.

People spend time on Facebook. A lot of time.

When you look at Nielsen’s ratings of the top U.S. web properties, Facebook comes in at No. 2, after Google, with an audience of 153.4 million. But the time those people spend on Facebook dwarfs every other site in Nielsen’s top 10, with Facebook visitors spending an average of 6 hours and 51 minutes per person per month.

That means people in the U.S. spend more than one billion hours per month using Facebook, every month.

By contrast, Nielsen reports that people using Google only spend 1 hour 37 minutes per month on the site (for a total of 280 million hours), while users of No. 3-ranked Yahoo spend 2 hours and 17 minutes on that site (for a total of 330 million hours).

It makes sense, when you think of how people use these sites. At Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and even Wikipedia, most people come to the sites to look something up, then they move on. At Facebook, it’s hard to visit without getting sucked into the latest updates from your friends, clicking on interesting videos they’ve shared or looking at your childhood friend’s latest photos of his baby.

Facebook may not be making the best use of this time — its revenue figures will tell more — but that level of what used to be called “stickiness” means it has an awful lot to work with.

Facebook is building a new operating system for the web.

Facebook is not just a social network, it’s a development platform upon which you can build applications. With a new array of developer tools and the ability to share information about what people are doing in real time on its Open Graph, Facebook is attempting to make itself into the platform of choice for any web developers.

Facebook started with one verb — you could “like” things or not — but is now expanding its lexicon, so Facebook apps can let you “watch,” “read” or “eat” things. In time, any human experience will be able to be codified in a Facebook app and recorded on your Timeline.

I don’t know whether developers will flock to Facebook. For now, building an application on your own website gives you far more control, as well as ownership of any customers you bring in. If you start using Facebook to help authenticate visitors, or to manage your comment system, as many website builders have done you are ceding some of that value to Facebook.

As long as Facebook offers value to developers that exceeds the loss of control it demands, it will be able to attract them to its platform. But at what point do they decide that enough is enough?

Facebook is trying to become the new Aol.

The reason investors get so excited about Facebook is the same reason those of us who love the open web get nervous about it: Facebook is building a walled garden that will give its customers everything they could possibly want, from cat videos to news analysis by the Washington Post, in one place. Unlike the open web, Facebook will control everything, making the experience consistent, ensuring safety, enforcing rules about decency and copyright and identity, and taking a cut of every transaction.

Here’s another way to look at it: Facebook is trying to do what Aol failed to do in the 1990s: Create a safe, family-friendly, completely controlled alternative to the open Internet.

That has enormous implications for Facebook’s potential future earnings. Of course it makes people like myself, who came of age during the Internet’s early days, exceedingly wary.

Only one company has made significant money from that platform so far.

Despite Facebook’s massive reach, stickiness, and the all-encompassing nature of its platform, there’s one shortcoming: It’s not actually monetizing itself very well right now.

In fact, there’s only one company that’s been truly successful building apps on the Facebook platform, and that’s Zynga, which grew to a $9 billion powerhouse largely on the basis of its Facebook relationship. While many companies have built apps, Zynga is the only company to have gotten big enough from its use of the Facebook platform to hold a big IPO itself.

As Forrester analyst Nate Elliott writes, marketing on Facebook doesn’t actually work that well, and the company’s revenue model is pretty simplistic.  That may be one reason why it hasn’t attracted much corporate spending to date, and each Facebook user is actually worth less to the company’s overall value than Google’s users are to it. In order to grow into a meaningful platform that will attract and retain many developers, and resist onslaughts from better-organized platforms, Facebook will need to solve both of those problems.

A big pile of cash from its IPO could certainly help.

Image credit: Shutterstock/De Mango

At a private event in San Francisco Wednesday night, the social network announced a slew of new partners are using Actions, the Facebook feature that will let developers make just about any verb a semantically cross-indexed link.

What does all that mean? Let’s take a simple example as an illustration.

Let’s suppose you just bought a Juicy Couture velour tracksuit. In days of yore, you might have hopped onto Facebook and told all your friends in a status update, “I am now the proud owner of a Juicy Couture tracksuit! It’s so blingy; I love it.”

In the new world of Facebook Actions, you would simply click an “Own” button next to the tracksuit you bought on a Facebook partner site. On related parts of your Facebook profile, the app you used to show you “own” the tracksuit would add that item to a list featuring other purchases you’ve made. Other Facebook-linked apps you use might show other lists — for example, clothes you’ve worn, products you want, books you’ve read, movies you’ve reviewed — anything you’ve talked about on the network or on Facebook-connected sites around the web.

Actions are kind of the Holy Grail of semantic data, defining relation types between people, objects, content, places, businesses, and so much more. If users warm to the idea of Actions, it might also be one of the most valuable and lucrative move Facebook will ever make.

All your apps, all your stories, all on Facebook

Facebook’s initial partners for the Actions launch.

More than 60 partners are working with Facebook to create and roll out Actions for this initial launch. These partners are in verticals from food to fitness to travel and beyond. Companies such as Pinterest, Airbnb, Pose, RottenTomatoes, Runkeeper, and Foodspotting will be among the initial partners.

If you’re interested, you can start adding apps right now. Facebook has a video at that link explaining how the apps will interact with your Timeline.

And starting today, any application that wants to integrate with Facebook Actions and Timelines will be approved in the coming weeks and months.

Ideally, said Facebook exec Carl Sjogreen at tonight’s event, any app you find meaningful will be able to connect to Facebook in a way that’s more meaningful than just clicking a “Like” button or automating shares from that app to your Facebook wall — and that all your stories will be told, not through a universe of apps, but universally on Facebook and with a structured context.

All activities from a given app will be summed up at the end of the month — for example, your “wanted” and “spotted” items on Foodspotting would appear in a visual graph together on each month in your Timeline.

“The call to developers is to start your engines,” Sjogreen concluded. “We’re excited to see what you’re going to build.”

Evolving beyond “Likes”

We recently spoke with Payvment CEO Christian Taylor, who told us Actions have the potential to be far more important than the already ubiquitous “Like” button.

As one of the leading enablers of “f-commerce,” or retail and commerce occurring on and around Facebook, Payvment has been using “Want” and “Own” buttons linked to the Facebook social graph. In the image on the left, you can see Payvment’s buttons in action.

“The Open Graph has been around for two years, but it was really based on the Like button, which never really worked,” said Taylor. “It really doesn’t mean anything to anybody.”

Actions, he continued to say, would help to bring even more opportunities to learn about content and products to Facebook users. “These new buttons are really going to drive discovery, just like Spotify did with music.”

At Facebook’s f8 developer conference last year, when Actions were first revealed, even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that “Like” buttons were limited.

“We’re helping to define a new language for how people connect,” Zukcerberg said at that time. “When we started, the vocabulary was limited” to simple, inexpressive “Likes.”

So starting now, instead of “liking” a book, you can tell friends you “Read” it through Facebook’s new vocabulary of Actions. But you’re not just telling your friends; you’re telling Facebook and Facebook’s vast network of advertisers and brands.

The more businesses large and small are able to understand the relationships between us consumers and the products we consume (and the sentiments we express around those interactions and relationships), the more targeted and effective they can make their marketing. It’s only as insidious as capitalism itself, and this type of intelligence is the kind of thing that could quickly bring online advertising to its evolutionary apex — at least for now.

“The company will collect more data than ever, if you allow it, and it will offer you enticements to share that data,” wrote VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi in an op-ed back when Actions was first previewed.

“[Facebook] can, for instance, take your information and mine it for useful nuggets. It can give you back statistical information about your behavior that you didn’t know about… If there was any doubt that Facebook is a data mining company with a lot of ‘big data,’ that ended today.”

Activity without annoyance

The Ticker on the Facebook homepage. Actions will appear here. Rolling over Ticker activity will trigger a flyout with more information and interactions.

However, from the user’s perspective, one of the best parts about Actions is that you can use them without incessantly oversharing to your friends.

When you share a post or update your status on Facebook, it will appear in your friends’ news feeds. But when you have an Action coming from the Open Graph (i.e., from a site that exists outside Facebook but that uses Facebook Connect in some way), that activity will only appear in the Ticker and on your own Timeline.

(The Ticker is a lightweight, real-time stream of activity that shows up on the right side of the Facebook homepage. It showcases various minutiae from your friends, from Actions to songs they’re listening to and beyond.)

Many Actions partners will offer granular settings to give you control over what you share. For example, design-centric flash-sale site Fab.com’s “Bought” actions are opt-in. Like the Actions turned on but don’t want to share a particular purchase with your friends? Mark it as a gift to hide it. Don’t worry about embarrassing buys; all Fab.com “adult” items are hidden by default.

“You may not want your mom to know you just bought a sexy piece of lingerie, but you can change that,” said a Fab.com spokesperson. “We want to make sure our customers are as comfortable as possible with sharing.”

For Actions coming into Facebook from outside apps, users won’t get prompts for each Action they take; those blips on the radar will simply appear on the Ticker then vanish — mostly. Since this real-time stream generates a lot of noise with very little signal, the Actions will also be archived on users’ Facebook profiles, where deeper digging will unearth various kinds of actions he or she has taken in the past.

Facebook’s redesign of profile pages in to Timelines has made this separation of high-level and low-level information possible and easy to navigate.

“We had to figure out the interactions that people wanted to have, the social construction,” said Facebook design chief Sam Lessin in a recent interview with VentureBeat about the Timeline design.

“It’s designed very differently from News Feed,” he continued, noting that while the elements of the Timeline you can see now are very much related to what’s going on in your life day by day and month by month, other sections of the profile are tailor-made for deeper digging.

As Facebook executive Bret Taylor explained it, with the addition of Actions to Facebook profiles, “You can see everything you have ever done in any app.”

Top image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell.

Facebook’s ambitious plan to weave various actions we take across the web into the social network via “frictionless” sharing is finally ready to be deployed, VentureBeat has learned.

The remaining pieces of Facebook’s new Open Graph are in the final stages of testing and are nearing release, a source familiar with the matter told VentureBeat. The social networking company is quickly working to validate partners and could turn on the latest element, Facebook Actions, any day now or, at the most, in a few weeks, the source said.

The new Open Graph, unveiled at Facebook’s f8 developer conference in September, consists of three key elements: Timeline, Ticker and Actions. The first two pieces have been successfully deployed — although they both were met with some user resistance. Now, it’s time for the world to be introduced to a whole new type of social sharing with Actions. (Facebook told developers to expect the first Action approvals in January.)

“We’re currently focused on the rollout of Timeline, which already features several apps in the news, music and video categories. In the coming weeks, Timeline apps will launch in more categories, including fitness, sports, food, and travel,” a Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat when asked about the deployment.

What are Actions, exactly? You already know what they are — you’ve been using them for months. Facebook previewed the new Open Graph capabilities with its own “Read,” “Listen” and “Watch” Actions (that’s why you’re always in the known when a Facebook friend listens to tracks on Spotify or reads an article from the Washington Post Social Reader). Facebook calls this kind of sharing frictionless because the actions are automatically posted to your Ticker or Timeline.

You can think of them as the new “Like” button, but Actions are instead used to document the behaviors you take elsewhere on the web. Actions are created and defined by third-party developers, and soon you’ll start to see them everywhere: in Ticker, News Feed and Timeline on Facebook, and in the applications or on the sites you’ve already come to love.

A cooking site, for instance, could create the “Cooked” action and associate that action with its collection of recipes. You’d then be able to click a button to indicate that you’ve cooked something and automatically share that update to Ticker. You’d also be able to add that same cooking application as a box to your Timeline, and in so doing show off all the recipes you’ve made in a small container on your Timeline.

Just how big of a deal is this? Facebook itself calls Actions (and their associated Objects) “the building blocks of Open Graph.”

“We know that our members are tech-savvy and actively engaged in social media, so providing members with the ability to reserve a Zipcar directly through Facebook is a natural next step,” Scott Griffith, chief executive of Zipcar in a statement.

According to member surveys performed by Zipcar, 88 percent of Zipcar users are also Facebook users who spend roughly 15 hours a day on the social network. So why not capture the audience where it spends the most time? Not to mention the obvious opportunity to acquire new customers from Facebook’s 800 million active users.

Visitors to the Zipcar Facebook app will be able to find and reserve available cars, get direction to the car’s locations, and of course, share the reservation with friends. You will also be able to extend or cancel a reservation directly from Facebook and because it is a canvas app, there is no reason for Zipcar member to leave the Facebook website.

Facebook recently made a slew of changes to its platform allowing these apps to really flourish. These changes include updates to it’s developer-focused Open Graph, the ability to integrate different vocabulary into your “likes,” and more.

Zipcar users can also stay mobile through Zipcar’s mobile app available on both Android, iPhone and website.

Spotify, which allows people to share playlists with friends, recently partnered with Facebook to offer integration with Facebook’s new Open Graph platform. One aspect of the new integration is automatically sending notifications to Facebook of whatever song you’re listening to in real-time.

The new Facebook integration made many Spotify users angry for fear of being ridiculed for their music selection. For example, you can imagine the embarrassment VentureBeat editor Dylan Tweney would feel if the entire staff discovered that he listened to Rebecca Black’s “Friday” 12 times in a single hour — (hypothetically speaking, of course).

“We’re rolling out a new client as we speak where you can temporarily hide your guilty pleasures. It works like a browser’s private mode,” said Spotify CEO Daniel Ek in a Tweet earlier today.

Spotify isn’t the only streaming media service that plans to automatically update Facebook with whatever you’re watching/listening/reading. Streaming video services Netflix and Hulu, as well as several news publications like the Wall Street Journal, are also offering integration with Facebook’s Open Graph.

Although Spotify is the first to add a blanketed “private mode”, it’s something I think a lot of services will end up doing in the future.

Image via Kerosene Photography

Updated 10pm Pacific with comments from Facebook.

Entrepreneur and hacker Nik Cubrilovic reports that Facebook can track the web pages you visit even when you are logged out of Facebook.

According to Cubrilovic’s tests, Facebook merely alters its tracking cookies when you log out, rather than deleting them. Your account information and other unique identifiable tokens are still present in these cookies, which means that any time you visit a web page with a Facebook button or widget, your browser is still sending personally identifiable information back to Facebook.

“With my browser logged out of Facebook, whenever I visit any page with a Facebook like button, or share button, or any other widget, the information, including my account ID, is still being sent to Facebook,” Cubrilovic wrote.

“They definitely have the information stored,” Cubrilovic told VentureBeat in an interview today. “As to what they do with it, you can only speculate.”

Facebook engineer Arturo Bejar said (in the comments on this post) that Facebook uses the data from logged-out cookies only to prevent spamming, phishing and other security risks.

“Also please know that also when you’re logged in (or out) we don’t use our cookies to track you on social plugins to target ads or sell your information to third parties,” Bejar said.

Cubrilovic’s claims are based on his analysis of HTTP headers sent by browsers to Facebook.com. He says the tests are repeatable by anyone with a browser that has development tools installed.

If correct, this could be a potentially serious violation of privacy. Some people are already alarmed that Facebook’s new “open graph” apps can report what you are reading or listening to in real time, adding the media you consume to your profile as an update without you clicking a “like” button.

It’s not clear how Facebook’s 800 million reported users will react to this revelation. “Facebook trains you to undervalue your privacy,” said author and BoingBoing editor Cory Doctorow earlier this week at the Strata Summit in New York, and many of the site’s users have shown no hesitation at all in continuing to use the site despite its complicated and constantly-changing privacy settings.

On the other hand, consumer reaction to Facebook’s Beacon feature several years ago forced the company to significantly revamp its approach. Beacon was similar to this year’s open graph in that it shared information about what you were doing online without you having to take explicit actions, like clicking on a button. Eventually, Facebook changed the way this worked, so nothing was shared without your explicit permission.

To block Facebook from following you, you need to delete all Facebook-related cookies after logging out. You may also be able to use AdBlock Plus to block Facebook, with the following rules, as reported on Hacker News:

facebook.com^$domain=~facebook.com ~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
facebook.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
fbcdn.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
fbcdn.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net


Note: we haven’t tested these rules for efficacy yet.

Keller left Facebook on Friday and is joining Socialcast, a San Francisco-based startup which focuses on social-networking tools for business collaboration, the companies confirmed to VentureBeat over the weekend.

For Facebook, a public perception that it adopts and supports open standards helps in several ways, from wooing third-party developers to recruiting engineers who may be reluctant to work on proprietary technology. That’s likely why it recruited Keller from MySpace in February.

Specifically, the company is hoping that software developers and Web publishers will adopt its Open Graph API, a tool for connecting websites to Facebook’s lists of friends and collection of preferences or “likes.”

In a statement, Facebook said it “wished [Keller] well” but did not comment on the reason for her departure. A source familiar with Keller’s thinking said she clashed with David Recordon, Facebook’s senior open programs manager, on its philosophy of building software quickly without explicitly supporting open standards from the beginning.

Facebook’s engineering department cultivates a culture of fast experimentation. Its motto is “Move fast, break stuff” — in other words, write code swiftly to test new ideas and features, without getting wrapped up in concerns over how it may interact with other systems.

But that breaking-stuff ethos may conflict with the caution inherent in working with open standards, which require a high level of compatibility with software written by others.

Keller will now have an opportunity to test Facebook’s commitment to openness from the outside. Socialcast said she will lead its implementation of Facebook’s Open Graph API throughout its Enterprise Activity Streams, a technology which brings real-time data from social networks into businesses’ daily work.

[Photo: Adam Tinworth]

“Where we’re going from here is a platform strategy. We’re going away from a one-off app strategy,” said Erick Tseng in his first public appearance since joining Facebook as head of mobile products. Speaking at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference today, he said the company will start building out this effort over the next several months.

“We want to provide mobile developers with all the goodness of the open graph,” he said. Such a move would parallel what Facebook has done for the non-mobile web with a platform that now supports more than 550,000 applications and 1 million developers.

Tseng pointed to location as one area where social features could strengthen user experience. “If you can actually layer on top of [location] some kind of social intelligence — not just the fact that I’m near Starbucks, but the fact that 30 of my friends really like this frappuccino over the last couple months — I’ve got an interesting use case,” he said.

Part of a mobile platform strategy could include making app discovery and distribution more social, he said. But he declined to comment on whether Facebook had been in discussions with app store operators like Apple or Google to add such social features.

He did say that, “Inevitably, app stores will become more social. As we get more apps, that’s going to be great. But the average user isn’t going to go through thousands of apps on their phone.”

He also said that 150 million users now access Facebook through phones and that mobile devices are fueling its more recent growth globally.

“Mobile is fast-becoming our growth lever. As we begin to continue to expand, we’re starting to go into geographies where phones are the predominant way you access the web,” he said. “Mobile is a way we can get users to be aware of and engage with social services.”

Two months ago, Facebook launched 0, a free mobile version of the social network aimed at developing markets where there is limited access to the Internet. Today the company has agreements with 66 mobile operators in 56 developing countries to provide the service free of charge. Last week, the company signed agreements with Bharti Airtel in India and Beeline and MTS in Russia.

Tseng said that mobile operators in many of these newer markets have only recently added data services, so they’re using Facebook as a way to study how consumers use data. “We think this will lead to more growth for Facebook, and more data consumption worldwide,” he said.

Facebook also added a mobile-only sign-up flow for new users, because if a person wanted to sign up for the social network, they used to have to log on with a PC first. ”We were blocking ourselves from getting millions of new users in countries like India,” he said.

Tseng brushed off rumors about a forthcoming rival social network from his old employer Google, where he led development of its Nexus One phone.

“We’ve set our own very ambitious internal goals and vision and if we do that, we’ll do best by our users,” he said. He also said the company wasn’t in any hurry to add advertisements to its mobile apps.

Hoffman was speaking at the annual meeting of the National Venture Capital Association. Facebook’s recent move to spread its plugins and “Like” buttons across the Web has drawn criticism because it gives the social network so much data about user activity. However, venture capitalists at the conference sounded less interested in privacy concerns and more in what it means for business. Specifically, one VC asked Hoffman whether the Open Graph would be good for other Web 2.0 services.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Hoffman said. “It’s very bold. It’s a good poster to all entrepreneurs — ‘here’s how you can think big.’”

As for web startups, most of them will benefit from the additional social features that the Open Graph enables, he said. The ones who will suffer are those competing directly with Facebook’s plugins or with upcoming features like the social toolbar Facebook will bring to outside websites. Hoffman compared Facebook to a tanker ship. Most companies will be able to pull their ships alongside the big Facebook vessel, but there are a few that will be destroyed, because they’re directly in the tanker’s path.

“That’s always what happens in these kinds of competitive circumstances,” he said.

The word “open” — like “green” or “eco-conscious” — is one of the more amorphous concepts floating about the tech industry. Google touts openness while keeping its advertising and search algorithms secret. On the opposing side, Apple regularly faces heated criticism about the barriers it has erected to the app store.

The truth is, both proprietary and purely open systems have their flaws. Most companies lay somewhere in between despite their rhetoric.

Facebook’s grand idea this week was the “Open Graph.” It’s a fundamentally different way of mapping the web via people’s real social relationships and affinities toward things like music, books and local venues, instead of hyperlinks between static pages. The project involves spreading “Like” buttons around the web that record people’s preferences and having companies add metadata to their sites so Facebook can treat them almost like Fan Pages housed within Facebook’s site.

The moves sparked criticism that the company was collecting data on people’s preferences without giving them the power to port that information elsewhere and that it was compelling publishers across the web to reformat their pages to Facebook’s liking.

“Rather than using data that’s already on the web, everyone that wants to play Facebook’s game needs to go and retrofit their pages to include these new metadata types,” wrote Chris Messina, a longtime open source advocate who now works for Facebook’s much bigger rival Google. ”When … Facebook gets to hoard all of the metadata and likes around the interactions between people and content, it depletes the ecosystem of potential and chaos.”

Both of Facebook’s moves carry big implications for startups that don’t want to play by the company’s rulebook. So a few have already launched counter-initiatives. Hunch co-founder and prolific angel investor Chris Dixon has helped form OpenLike, a way for people to share their preferences with multiple services. Another competitor Meebo has partnered with Google and other companies to launch XAuth, a system that lets web site owners figure out which social networks a person uses and allows them to log-in with the network of their choice.

Facebook’s own openness advocate, David Recordon, argued that the company’s moves were open. Developers can now store Facebook user data for more than 24 hours and subscribe to changes in user data in real-time. He added that any developer could make use of the new metadata that publishers add to their pages. Plus, the company has adopted OAuth, a way for users to share parts of their data like friend lists, photos or status updates, without handing over their IDs or passwords.

The company is positioning this Open Graph as a fundamentally different way of thinking about the Web compared to how Google has mapped it via hyperlinks over the past decade. And it’s a big trend that’s emerged from the last two weeks of major product announcements from Twitter and Facebook — namely, how do you organize this mass of real-time behavior and sharing by content type and display it in a social context?

That’s more sophisticated than status updates and simple media sharing. When you “like” or post a status update about a band, Facebook and Twitter want to know in a structured way that you might be referring to your favorite music group. They don’t want to scrape it from imprecise language in a status update.

Facebook’s concept is far more ambitious than Twitter’s, however. Twitter is adding metadata to tweets. Facebook is trying to add socially intelligent metadata to the entire Web — this is a move that puts Google in its crosshairs. Google can use its gobs and gobs of data to infer what Web pages are about, but it has so far failed to execute on any of its social projects and therefore doesn’t really have a good idea of how these pages matter to real people.

From a technical perspective, Facebook is treating all people and things (like these movies and restaurants) as objects. Then it’s mapping out the links between them, based on what people say they explicitly “like.”

A page at graph.facebook.com/username shows a person’s public profile in JSON, a format that’s readable by other applications. If people publicly reveal their movie preferences, you could go to graph.facebook.com/username/movies and see their favorite movies.

You can also do things like call events through the URL graph.facebook.com, and then you can call for metadata to see who was invited, attending or declined — if that information is public.

Facebook is providing suggestions for how to label objects (pictured above). That’s so you don’t run into a problem where one developer calls a bar a ‘Bar’ while another calls it a ‘Pub,’ creating confusion when applications try to interact with each other. This is very different from how Twitter launched Annotations last week, a way of tagging and organizing tweets. Twitter has provided no guidance on how to structure terms yet.

About six to eight months ago, Facebook engineers at the company began thinking about how to redesign the company’s application programming interface. The older API offered 20 different ways of interacting with it, growing ever clunkier over time.

“We wanted to come up with a model that didn’t have this structural flaw,” said Facebook engineer Mike Vernal. ”One of the deeply held beliefs on the platform team was to make this API tactile — to make it so that you could play with the API without having to read documentation or deal with anything other than the underlying data.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized a different philosophy for how the Web should be organized today at the f8 conference in San Francisco.

“The Web is made of unstructured pages linked together. The open graph puts people at the center of the Web. It puts personal and semantic meaning behind the Web — I like this band. I am attending this event,” he said. “We think what we will show you today is the most transformative thing we’ve done for the Web.”

Zuckerberg said the company would use the open graph to make the Web an instantly personal and sociable experience.

“The Web is at a really important turning point right now. Up until recently, the default on the Web has been that most things aren’t social and most things don’t use your real identity,” he said. “We’re building toward a Web where the default is social. Every application will be designed from the ground up to use real identity and friends.”

At the first f8 conference in 2007, Zuckerberg introduced the idea of the social graph — mapping the idea of a massively interconnected web of relationships. The open graph has a much broader definition, and goes beyond Facebook. Facebook has mapped social relationships, while Yelp, for example, has mapped out local venues.

“If we can take these separate parts of the graph, we can create a Web that’s smarter, more personally and semantically aware,” he said. “One of the core ideas of the social graph is what people are connected to…. For example, I am friends with Chris Cox. I live in Palo Alto.”

Zuckerberg said these core relationships could fundamentally change the idea and experience of Facebook’s news feed, which is sometimes referred to as a stream of updates.

“The stream is ephemeral. The services that form a stream don’t actually form a connection between you and your favorite restaurant. What we’re going to do is make it possible to map those connections. Once it’s possible to understand these connections, a lot of really neat things become possible. We can show you a news feed story when three of your friends all like the same restaurant. If you write a review, we can put that restaurant on your profile.”

The company said it had rearchitected its entire structure around this strategy and was releasing a graph application programming interface.

With the new open graph approach, Facebook is launching a series of social plugins. Zuckerberg showed a demo of a CNN-Facebook integration. When a user logs on, they can see other friends or people who enjoyed the same content. There will also be a plug-in that shows the activity of friends on CNN’s website.