What you missed at Facebook’s f8 conference

VentureBeat has been drowning today in posts from f8, Facebook’s developer conference in San Francisco. Obviously, we think there was plenty of news worth covering, but for someone who wasn’t checking the site every few hours, it might be a little overwhelming.

So if you want some help trying to see the big picture, read this post: “Facebook socializes the web with powerful new plugins.” This was our coverage of the social network’s big announcement today, with the launch of plugins that dramatically expand its presence across the web. These plugins enable what Facebook says is a new philosophy for the web — one that is centered around people and their real affiliations, and one that therefore places Facebook at the center.

Follow that post by reading “Graph API, Like button put Web at Facebook’s beck and call,” which explains why this news is a big deal.

After that, catch up with our other posts from the conference:

Mark Zuckerberg says it’s all about the open graph — Before getting into the details of Facebook’s new features, CEO Zuckerberg outlined the philosophy behind them: “The Web is made of unstructured pages linked together. The open graph puts people at the center of the Web.”

Facebook has 400M users, 100M on Connect — Zuckerberg shared some numbers on how massive the site and related services have become. Oddly, the big number, 400 million users worldwide, was the same milestone the company mentioned crossing back in February.

Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook credits are coming soon — The new virtual currency Facebook Credits will have some big implications for the company’s ecosystem of publishers and developers.

Microsoft Office and Facebook partner to ward off Google Docs — Microsoft and Facebook launched a site called Docs.com this morning, which is all about sharing your documents using Facebook. The announcement wording makes it sound like this is more an early test of a site than a core feature of Office, but Docs.com seems to have a lot of potential.

FriendFeed cofounder: No plans to shut down the site — As one of a dwindling number of users on social service FriendFeed, I felt pretty confident that the site would disappear eventually. But FriendFeed cofounder Bret Taylor, who is now Facebook’s director of product, reaffirmed at f8 that there are no plans to take the service down.

New data storage rules, permissions could rekindle Facebook privacy concerns — Facebook announced that it’s getting rid of restrictions that developers can only store user data for 24 hours in a move that could rekindle privacy concerns.

Zuckerberg takes off the “serious” necktie for 2010 — Last year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg switched from neutral-colored hoodies to a business shirt, jacket and necktie. Good news for geekdom: The necktie is gone.

Facebook’s shot across the bow of Google: More on the open graph — We look more closely at what the open graph is and why it’s significant.

Scribd adds social tools for people tired of reading alone — Following Facebook’s announcements, book- and document-sharing site Scribd unveiled features taking advantage of the new capabilities. While that might sound like a minor upgrade, founder and chief executive Trip Adler said the improvements should reshape who uses Scribd and why.

How Facebook plans to fuel the app economy with Facebook Credits — Facebook Credits manager Deb Liu said the goal is to make it “friction-less” for users to adopt virtual currency and to start spending it across a bunch of Facebook apps.

Web pioneer Marc Andreessen: Twitter developers are thinking too small — At one of the panels, Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist who also cofounded Netscape and Ning, weighed in on the Twitter platform debate with a position that probably won’t make Twitter developers happy.

f8 outsiders: It’s pronounced “eff ate” at Facebook — For our final post, we answer the most important question of all.