How Facebook’s f8 changes will affect you in 600 words or less.

In case you don’t know, Facebook announced sweeping changes to their strategy and technology at their f8 conference on Wednesday. If you’re a stakeholder in a business with any web presence whatsoever, you can’t afford to ignore this fundamental shift.

The shift boils down to this: the barrier to entry for integrating Facebook’s social data into any site has been dramatically lowered.

Take a look at these 8 social plugins: http://developers.facebook.com/plugins. Adding one of them to your site is as easy as dropping in google analytics or embedding a youtube video.

These plug-and-play components that Facebook released, while nice, are truly just the tip of the iceberg. The real importance behind the f8 announcements is how they affect the relationship between Facebook and web developers.

If you’re a web developer you likely have some measure of animosity towards the Facebook platform. Dealing with the Facebook API was a necessary evil. The platform was non-standard, laughably documented, difficult to test and debug, and rife with baffling and inconsistent design decisions.

Everyone dealing with it at some point thought “this should not be so hard, there must be a simpler way.” Bret Taylor, former CEO and co-founder of FriendFeed, shared that sentiment while dealing with the platform significantly more than most. Fortunately for all of us, Facebook bought FriendFeed and appointed Bret as the head of the Facebook platform.

Developers, if you haven’t already, you can get all the proof you need that this was the right decision by spending 5 minutes skimming this: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api. Dive in for an hour and you’ll see that it’s an intuitive and well-designed true REST api that returns standardized json or xml, and it’s finally clearly and logically documented.

If you’re not a developer and you’re preparing to skip the rest of this because tech-talk started and you don’t even know what the acronym API stands for (it’s Application Programming Interface), don’t. A shallower API learning curve and better integration with existing tools may seem convenient for developers and irrelevant to non-developers, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Look at Twitter — despite a miniscule and skewed user base as compared to Facebook, they joined the conversation when CNN et. al. noticed their explosive growth. This growth was primarily a function of two factors: rapid innovation and low barriers to entry for new user interaction (one-click follows etc).

The significant point here is that the vast majority of Twitter’s innovation did not come from within. They started with a well-designed and open API, and put the onus of innovation on the open market of thousands of developers who wanted a piece of their pie.

Facebook, in f8, has introduced both a well-designed and open API and lower barriers to entry for user interaction (“likes” that double as “follows”). They’ve essentially stepped out of the way and allowed their innovation to be powered by the open market of the hundreds of thousands of developers who want a piece of *their* pie.

I can’t tell you what the game-changing application will be that uses the new Facebook graph API, but I can tell you that there will be one that affects the way all of us use the internet. And when Facebook buys them for some obscene amount of money, there will be an “overnight gold rush” that in reality was set into motion this past Wednesday.

And that’s how Facebook’s f8 changes will affect you in 600 words or less.