Yesterday’s Facebook event was proof that Facebook not only sees Germany as an important market from a user perspective, but that it also wants to instigate and support German engineering on its platform. No, we are not talking sheep throwing here! With the announcements facebook made at the f8 developer conference in California 4 weeks ago, facebook seeks to host better Apps and after Games venture out into other verticals such as music and TV. More on that in coming days though, when I will write a more profound post about the next facebook. 

Yesterday in Berlin, the presentations on the new possibilities of the Open Graph were very interesting indeed, also for someone like me, who does not have a developer background. One presenter even hacked a new Facebook App on stage for everyone to follow. For some this was too technical and I heard the founder of a Berlin based music startup say that he will send his CTO after lunch.

The audience was as alert as developers can be. Needless to say that everyone was multitasking with people texting, facebooking, tweeting, tumbling and wordpressing while at the same time listening to the presentations and having a couple of stop-motion conversations - just a regular day of work I would say. Facebook had specially installed a “1Gbs WLan Standleitung” which seemed like early Christmas to most. The use of Google Plus was strictly forbidden of course! Just kidding… 

Anyway, apart from getting a developer perspective of the new Open Graph Platform, facebook shared some interesting facts and figures, too that I have not come across anywhere before:

• Facebook now has 20M users in Germany
• 250M photos are uploaded per day which makes facebook a bigger photo sharing site than the 5 biggest photo sites combined (Flickr, Picasa, etc.)
• More people play games on facebook every day than play PlayStation, X-Box and Nintendo combined
• The Open Graph API and Social Advertising will merge more and more in the future. Currently the platform team (organic traffic for developers) and the advertising team (paid traffic) are seen as separate entities at facebook, but in the future these will work closer together
• The announcement in German press that facebook tracks users on third party websites even after they have logged out of facebook can apparently be ascribed to a bug which facebook says to have fixed within 24 hours
• Pages will probably adapt the Timeline design soon
• Apps will not have Profile pages in the future, but get regular Fan Page style pages

What to me was best about yesterday’s event was the fact that it was quite intimate with no more than 150 people (estimate!) attending. According to a facebook staff member the ratio of facebook staff (mostly developers) to guests was 1to20. During drinks and “office hours” in the end, this ratio allowed everyone to engage directly with facebook employees and ask specific questions. Some spoke up their mind such as a guy who goes by the name of Minimus Informaciones and with whom Ethan Beard and me ended up having a rather philosophical conversation about Facebook’s role in the world. More on that soon. 

by Nikolas Woischnik