Facebook on Thursday displayed its site redesign and demonstrated its upcoming Facebook Connect at the second annual F8 developer conference in San Francisco.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg urged more than 400,000 developers to connect with the social-networking site and distribute their applications. He said the site will decentralize, with less being said about Facebook and more about social networking across the Internet.
Third-party applications can now be integrated into Facebook to make them more user-friendly, the company said. Users can choose to interact with an application, grant access to the user’s information, and decide the placement for profiles.
Zuckerberg noted problems with applications that disrupt the site experience by bombarding users with requests. To discourage this, applications that create “meaningful, trustworthy and well-designed user experiences” will be branded with a Great Apps label. The label means more visibility on Facebook, earlier access to new features, and more feedback. Though Facebook Connect is scheduled to start in September, Zuckerberg named iLike, a music-sharing application, and Causes, a social-activism application, as the inaugural Great Apps.
Facebook has been working on a redesign since early this year, and over the past six months has been fielding user suggestions on layout and features.
Facebook Connect will allow users to carry account information, privacy choices, and friends to any third-party Web site, desktop application, or device. When fully launched, users will be able to authenticate partner sites with a Facebook account; link friends wherever they go; ensure their privacy settings remain intact; and share actions with friends on sites they visit.
Already 24 Web sites and applications have linked to Facebook Connect and the company has set up a sandbox for developers.
Web sites such as Digg, City Search, and Six Apart began planning during the conference by demonstrating how they will implement Facebook…