Engineering
Facebook CPR
LC Ljubljana October 19th - October 27th 2013
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Text: Matej Vehar, LC Ljubljana
Photographs: LC Ljubljana
On 4th of February 2014 10 years had passed
since Mark Zuckerberg introduced well known
social network platform called The Facebook.
Maybe he was not the first one, but concepts
core team released were remarkable for direction the World Wide Web went into since that
moment.
From technical point of view, Facebook offered more than just blog like features. It combined personalization, virtual identity, later on
data mining, personalized adverts. Co-developer Andrew McCollum at that time worked
on WireHog, peer to peer file sharing program.
It was possible to log in with Facebook credentials and share pictures. That same functionality was later on integrated into Facebook
itself. Constant expansion, availability, security risks and users needs required good technical background. Although it was mixture of
state of the art functionalities enabling him to
withstand all this time, no matter what. It set
standards so high, that competitors have hard
time reaching the same maturity level.
Accessibility and popularity among internet
users soon catch attention of advertisers and
interest groups. Each year new global trends
are spread around, flow of information started
to change people’s perception and awareness. It has the power to change the world. In
2008 Barack Obama went for elections. Socially engaged and strongly supported among
youth won that same year. Alaa Abdul Nabi,
co-organizer of pro-Mubarak protest in Egypt
2011, wrote for Guardian:
“Facebook is not just for the revolutionaries;
we’re using it to gather people together, and
our page “Ana aasif ya rayyis” has over 83,000
supporters.”
We could say that Facebook connects people more than ever before. Participants of
FBCPR (Facebook Code&PR) workshop are
aware of that. During second week in October
2013 they had chance to scrape the surface of
what Facebook platform offers for interacting
with friends, users, customers. Divided into
groups, participants have developed some
pretty neat examples of what can be done in
a few days. Not only like and share buttons,
but also querying the Open Graph. For those
who want to give users ability to like the content you publish. To enable them to share it
to theirs friend or even build more complex
actions with available data, developers.facebook.com will be the place where to start
looking for. Prerequired knowledge depends
on platform you choose to build on, but in any
case good documentation and examples are
by your side.
Facebook is social network platform designed
to serve more than just ordinary users. Its capabilities can be used for data analysis, marketing and advertising, application environment, gaming, communication tool and after
all the most important, one central storage for
our virtual identities.
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