Platlas is designed to help you better understand your social networks. Our goal with this project is to introduce a visual perspective on social networks, breaking down the variety of actions that occur and to better educate users and companies alike with the first ever social network ecosystem exploration tool. You can read more about Platlas on our about section.
What you’ll discover here is an incomplete version of Platlas. We plan to roll out our next version with the perspective of a Facebook Page. We also intend to add features such as commenting, to promote community discussion and facilitate feedback and ideas for our future releases.
With our beta launch of Platlas, we aim to illustrate just how much Facebook has changed over the last few weeks. As we head into F8, we are exceptionally excited to hear directly from Facebook on the recent and upcoming updates to their platform, which we will work to incorporate into Platlas as soon as possible. Here are a few points where Facebook’s current platform differs this initial version of Platlas.
Facebook Changes
The way users update a status has changed:
- The default status update has been consolidated
- The ‘Link’ aspect of the status update has been removed, as links posted now automatically append the thumbnail summary of the content contained in the link.
- Places, and the checkin feature as it stood has been completely removed and is now appended to the regular status update. Users can add their location upon posting a status update without having to take a separate “checkin” action.
- An option to add friends as tags to a status update is now available.
- Photo and Video sharing has been consolidated
- Photos and videos are no longer their own separate categories.
Privacy and Smart Lists:
- Privacy has become a much better part of the status update. Facebook has now given users some control over what users and pages populate their newsfeeds. These lists allow users to share their posts with more specific audiences and to change the content of their newsfeed to only come from that specific group. These work in combination with privacy settings to give users better control over who sees content they post.
Share Tracking:
- A share action activity stream has been added. Similar to Tumblr, users can now see a stream of the social actions people take towards an object like a picture.
Subscribing:
- Users can now subscribe to other users in order to receive a user’s public updates in their newsfeed. Facebook has added newsfeed stories about a friend’s subscriptions, and an area for users to discover new people to subscribe to.
Applications:
- Every area on Facebook has been blown out into an application environment, meaning areas of Facebook that were once part of native functionality (i.e. Events, Photos) are now applications.
Stay tuned for new changes to be reflected in this graphic and going forward. As Facebook continues to update the platform we will track and report here, and incorporate into Platlas!