We’re hosting our third f8 conference in San Francisco today. There are two important themes behind everything we’re delivering today. First, the Web is moving to a model based on the connections between people and all the things they care about. Second, this connections-based Web is well on its way to being built and providing value to both users and developers — the underlying graph of connections just needs to be mapped in a way that makes it easy to use and interoperable.

Today we are introducing three new components of Facebook Platform to make the connections-based Web more real: social plugins, the Open Graph protocol, and the Graph API.

Social Plugins

Instantly engaging social experiences with just one line of HTML

Social plugins are the easiest way to integrate the social graph into your site and provide an instantly personalized experience to your users. The most important plugin is the Like button, available with one line of HTML. On Facebook and now anywhere, the Like button offers users a lightweight and consistent way to share the things and topics that interest them. With the Like button in place, you can leverage the other Facebook social plugins to personalize your site and drive traffic and engagement. The Activity Feed plugin shows users what their friends have liked on your site; the Recommendations plugin gives content suggestions from your site. The Facepile plugin shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site. As with the Like button, these social plugins are simple to use: via a line of HTML, or XFBML tags if you choose to use our new, faster — and opened-sourced — JavaScript SDK.

Open Graph Protocol

Any webpage can now easily become part of the social graph

On Facebook, users build their profiles through connections to what they care about — be it their friends or their favorite sports teams, bottles of wine, or celebrities. The Open Graph protocol opens up the social graph and lets your pages become objects that users can add to their profiles. When a user establishes this connection by clicking Like on one of your Open Graph-enabled pages, you gain the lasting capabilities of Facebook Pages: a link from the user’s profile, ability to publish to the user’s News Feed, inclusion in search on Facebook, and analytics through our revamped Insights product.

In summary, by giving your users better, simpler ways to connect with the content on your site, you can then use those connections to provide more personalized, relevant experiences. And the product only gets better over time. The more people that come back to your site, the more connections that are made, the better your service becomes.

Graph API

A drastically simplified way for developers to use Facebook Platform

We are excited to introduce the Graph API, a redesign of our core API that reflects the structure of the graph. This new API is a simple, consistent representation of data in the graph, so that all objects and APIs can be accessed via URLs.

We’ve also made it much easier to integrate with Facebook by using a simplified, standards-based method for authentication and authorization.We’ve adopted OAuth 2.0, a standard we’ve co-authored with the open community, including representatives from Google, Twitter, Yahoo, and others.

The Graph API is not only simpler, it is more powerful. We’ve enabled a search feature which lets you search over objects like people and events, and over the stream — both public stream updates and personalized ones for your users. In addition, the graph is ever-changing, so we’re launching real-time updates to let you subscribe to updates to user data. We’ll continue to support our old REST API, but will focus future improvements on the Graph API.

Hacking the Graph

People make meaningful connections everywhere, on every site they visit, on every device they use. As we open the graph, developers can use these connections to create a smarter, more personalized Web that gets better with every action taken.

We’re excited that more than 75 sites are launching today with social plugins, many with Open Graph-enabled pages. In the first 24 hours, these sites will serve over 1 billion Like buttons. We’ve also announced special partnerships with Microsoft, Pandora, and Yelp to build experiences where people can seamlessly transition between Facebook and other services. These unique partnerships help users discover how bringing friends along makes their Web experience better.

Through Facebook’s new tools and technologies, every developer — new and existing, big and small, novice and advanced — can engage users, build businesses, and revolutionize industries. This year’s f8 is about hacking the graph; we hope you’ll join us.

Learn more about these launches on our new developer site at developers.facebook.com.

Bret Taylor, head of Facebook Platform products, is stoked that f8 is today.