The New Facebook

Facebook today announced another redesign of its site.

Facebook News Feed to be renamed Stream.

The Facebook Stream shows your friends' activity as it occurs, with automatic refreshing built into the page. The status update box, now branded as Publisher, simply asks: "What's on your mind?" Any text, photos, or video entered into it go straight into your profile and onto your friends' home pages at the same time.

The revamped page features added filters as well. The filters give you greater control over what you see in the Stream, letting you choose to see updates from only specific users or specific sources. For example something from the director of the move Watchmen. If you'd rather not see content that comes from particular applications, for example, you can opt to filter it out.

One of the biggest changes is that Facebook is getting rid of the distinction between private profiles and public pages. The 5,000-friend limit will be dropped from the public pages. Facebook doesn’t want Twitter to become the way large companies and public figures connect to fans. Up until now, Facebook Pages haven’t really been the place fans go to connect with their favorite celebrities or brands. For that, they’ve started going to Twitter, where they can get updates in real time. So essentially, these pages will now migrate to the same Wall and tabs design that personal profiles have used.

Recent estimates put Facebook far ahead of the rest of the pack when it comes to social network traffic. Some analyses show Facebook drawing double the traffic of its nearest competitor, the much more seasoned MySpace. Even the co-founder of MySpace's original parent company is now calling the race in Facebook's favour.


Internet Marketing and Social Networking


How will these changes affect the way internet marketing is done on Facebook?

One change is the Oodle powered Facebook Marketplace which will be relaunched as part of the changes. With Oodle’s online classifieds technology in the background Facebook hopes to boosts its Marketplace usage by Facebook advertisers and members for buying and selling various products and services.


The new Facebook Marketplace will not immediately replace the old Facebook Marketplace. Facebook members who are still using it can see the link to the Marketplace as a bookmark on the Facebook Applications tag. Facebook members who have existing listings at the Facebook Marketplace will also be given the option to migrate their listings to the new Facebook Marketplace. In addition, the new Facebook Marketplace will also be listed on Facebook’s Application Directory. As to internet marketers can promote online business and the like will remain to be seen.

What do others think of these changes?