How the Facebook changes will play out

Last week Facebook held a conference called F8 and as a result there are lots of changes coming, with some people very excited and others not so much.

Personal Profile Changes

There will be a few changes coming to personal profiles over the next 2-4 weeks and some have already arrived, namely:

• Timeline. Your personal profile will now be a timeline of events in your life. This has been met with a lot of excitement as well as some trepidation. For me the jury is still out.
• Ticker. This is going to tell you what your friends are up to in real time. It is a box that will appear on the right of your page.
• Privacy settings. These have been changed again so they are easier to understand – best to judge for yourself. There are lots of complaints about privacy but people don’t take ownership of their settings.
• Subscribe. You can now subscribe to personal profile updates, e.g. you might subscribe to someone famous to see what they are doing, which doesn’t make you a friend, just a voyeur. For people to be able to subscribe to your posts you need to enable the feature on your profile and post PUBLIC posts. If you have your posts set for only friends to see those subscribers will see nothing.
• Friends lists. During the past few weeks (probably from the Google+ circles pressure) Facebook has changed these so that the lists you create appear on the left of your newsfeed.  I love this new feature because I can click on a list and just see the activity for those friends rather than have it mixed in with page posts and other friends.

Business Page Changes:

• People no longer need to LIKE the page to post on it.
• Content posted on the page wall that is shared appears showing how many times it was shared and on the place it is shared it says it came from the original page.
• There is a new tab on every page which shows your friend activity, i.e. which of your personal friends have commented or shared your page content.
• In page wall posts you now have 5000 characters to write a post – to give you an idea of what this looks like I am up to 2128 characters in this post now, including spaces.

Finally the other BIG change that I am excited to see how it will play out is with apps. They can now be created that will share everything you do in them without you doing it – e.g. the Washington Post app once activated shows people every article you click on and it appears in your ticker as “Lara is reading [name of the article]”. That could be a huge game changer because more and more content is going to be shared on Facebook.

Wow! Tell me in the comments which of the new features you like and which do you hate?

Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks mobile phone socks, Chief Rabbit at Social Rabbit – your guide in the world of social media, founder of Steps – the online Facebook and LinkedIn training course and author of ‘Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business’. Lara’s business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.