FACEBOOK FOUNDER Mark Zuckerberg upped the pressure on rivals including Google and Twitter when he unveiled a host of improvements to the social network at a conference in San Francisco last night.

The key announcement was an upgrade to the “open graph”, which makes it easier for Facebook users to discover new things from their friends’ activities.

Mr Zuckerberg said it would enable the creation of a new class of social software.

Mr Zuckerberg, speaking at the F8 developers’ conference, showed a music-sharing program from Spotify, the music streaming service, as an example of the new tools. The Spotify Facebook app will enable users to see the history of songs played and to listen to music together, he said.

The partnership with Spotify was widely expected, but Facebook is also working with partners including Hulu, SoundCloud, Mixcloud and Rdio.

Mr Zuckerberg said the new capabilities would result in a new class of media and lifestyle apps, adding that it would “allow people to rethink a lot of industries”.

News Corp is also releasing a Facebook version of its iPad-only publication the Daily, making it easy to share content with friends.

Many of the new media services, particularly in the areas of music and video, will not initially be available in Ireland due to copyright restrictions.

The Facebook chief executive also introduced tools that will let users display images and highlight which posts are important.

The other major component of Mr Zuckerberg’s keynote address was the announcement of Timeline, which shows content that users have posted to Facebook in the past. “It’s all your stories, all your apps and who you are.”

The feature allows friends to see the most important events in a person’s life during a particular year. “It’s a great way to discover all the things someone has done in their whole life,” said Mr Zuckerberg.

It is also possible to go back and add pictures and other content related to earlier periods in your life. Mr Zuckerberg stressed that users would have full privacy controls for Timeline.

He showed it working on an iPhone as well as a desktop PC.

Apps on the site will now be able to generate reports which show the kind of activities they engaged in over a period of time.

Mr Zuckerberg demonstrated an app that showed what dishes he had cooked in a single month.

The ubiquitous social network has also refined its “Like” feature, giving people the power to post that they “read” a book, “listened” to an album or “hiked” a trail.

These activities will show up in a “lightweight” version of the newsfeed called the ticker, which will allow friends to see them without overwhelming them with information.

Mr Zuckerberg also revealed that last week, Facebook had half a billion users in a single day for the first time in its history.