Facebook changes : Apps and features

As we predicted, Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at the f8 conference in San Francisco Thursday introduced some of the most profound changes seen on Facebook since its inception. In a complete overhaul of its ever-evolving profile page, Facebook is introducing Timeline. It encourages you to post more stuff about your past, such as baby pictures, using Facebook as a scrapbook.

The social network has launched Facebook Gestures, which means that Facebook’s partners and developers can turn any verb into a button.

Facebook apps need only ask permission once to share stories on your behalf. 5. You can watch TV and movies, listen to music, and read news with your friends — all within Facebook. 6. Facebook has more users and more engagement than ever. We got two interesting nuggets of information out of Zuckerberg (and the Zuckerberg-impersonating Andy Samberg): Facebook has hit 800 million users, and most of them are active. If there’s one thing Facebook is not afraid of, it’s change.

But there’s no question—Facebook remains the most ambitious, most technologically sophisticated, fastest-moving Internet company. The changes announced today were as big as anything the company has ever done—to turn Facebook into a real-time engine for seeing what your friends are doing and joining them right now; and to turn the Facebook profile into a full-scale vision of your entire life, in the form of a new feature called “timeline,” which enables your friends to slice and dice the photos, videos, posts, and all sorts of information about your life in new ways, going back in time as far back as the information goes.

Last year’s f8 saw the smash hit introduction of what Facebook called the “open graph”—the extension of its platform across the Internet, so any Website could tap into Facebook’s viral and social features. It makes the Facebook platform a place for real-time human interaction. Bret Taylor, Facebook’s chief technology officer, calls it “the biggest change we’ve made to our platform since we launched it at the first f8.” Longtime tech pundit and thinker Esther Dyson posted on Twitter today that Facebook was launching the “semantic Web” without calling it that.