I have not done a good job of following all the changes on Facebook in the last week, but few people have, because there have been many changes, both on the public user side and on the developer side. Many of these changes have been mentioned on the F8 conference, you can check videos here.

And here are few of the changes that i managed to catch:

  • Social plugins – by adding just a simple line on HTML to your websites, you can drive engagement – particularly with the Like button and the Activity Feed, which shows users what their friends liked on your sites; and even automate Recommendations of your websites’ content.

There is one very interesting fact about the on-site embeddable “Like” feature – it is supported by RDFa – which means that anyone who wants to use this functionality must also mark-up their pages with semantics, pushing the Semantic Web movement a big step closer towards getting semantic  mark-up throughout the Web.

Still, we’re talking just a simple line of HTML. This is all it takes to make you more social than you were before. Thus Facebook gets a broader sense of our little finger-patterns from all over the Web. Implications? Very significant:

“For example, if you like a band on Pandora, that information can become part of the graph so that later if you visit a concert site, the site can tell you when the band you like is coming to your area. The power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken.”

  • Open Graph Protocol – this one is everything that Google’s Orkut was planned to be, but alas, could not. This protocol turns your pages into “objects” that users can easily add to their profiles. “When a user establishes this connection by clicking Like on one of your Open Graph-enabled pages, you gain the lasting capabilities of Facebook Pages: a link from the user’s profile, ability to publish on the user’s News Feed, inclusion in search on Facebook, and analytics, through our revamped Insights product.“
  • The Graph API – supercharged with Facebook’s recent adoption of OAuth2.0, this redesign of the core API is more powerful than it is predecessor. A robust search feature lets you look up people and events, both in public streams and in personalized ones. Real-time updates let you subscribe to updates of user data.
  • Community Pages – these are pages on different topics of interest, owned by the people who love them – for example, you can have a community page about “Sushi”, with data from Wikipedia.

For a deeper explanation of all this, you can check out Scobleizer’s breakdown of why this is significant and what it means for Facebook. Also, i recommend you to see Pandora’s CTO sharing how these might impact the music genome project:

FYI: Facebook is swiftly approaching 500 million monthly unique visitors per month. There were 484 million worldwide uniques  in March, up 64% from this time last year!

On average, people log-in about 11 times a month, an increase from 8.5 times a month a year ago.