All is abuzz about the new changes that Facebook are in the process of unveiling on their social networking site. So what is changing, what is new, and how will this affect you?

What Facebook is trying to achieve, whether it is just because Google+ is snapping a their heels or not, is a better fit into our lives.  In other words a better way to express ourselves, connect with others and enjoy a “frictionless experience”.  A “frictionless experience” as labelled by Mark Zuckerberg himself, as opposed to one where we annoy our friends (and they annoy us) with frivolous information, rather an experience in which we are presented with the most interesting and relevant information (interesting to us).  What is interesting information to us is determined by our history, and how we respond to that information when it is presented to us.

Hint – hover “Top Stories” to “unmark as top story” or hide.

Our History!  This leads into what is possibly the biggest change that is being made, or the one that they are focussing on to distract from the others? Haven’t made my mind up on that one yet.  Introducing the Facebook Timeline…

What your new Facebook profile will look like

So you think that as time goes by all your status updates and comments just disappear off the bottom of the page? Wrong! All that information has come back to haunt you was your profile turns into your “Timeline” and all of a sudden you can go back in time and revisit the rantings of your past.  You may be able to see down the right hand side of the screen listed years past that you can click into to see what information you were sharing at that point in time.

I do think this is kind of cool, it’s like my own personal biography – you can even go back in your timeline and insert information and images to make the story more complete.  The biggest concern I had with this, however, is do I want everyone else to see all this information about me? A stalkers/identity thief’s wet dream really isn’t it?

This leads into the next change, and this is one that I am really excited about. In the past you have been able to segregate your friends into lists, but you couldn’t really do a whole lot with that information in terms of blocking out particular segments of your friends.  NOW you can share information with specific people and it will not be visible in any way to people other than those specified, no matter how hard they look.

Action Step – Segregate your friends list into close friends, clients, prospects, colleagues, acquaintances, family etc.

This is especially important if you are using Facebook for business purposes as it means that you can share personal information with your friends, and target clients and prospects with other information.  The end result is you are not bothering your friends with work stuff and you are maintaining professional boundaries with work colleagues, clients and potential clients.

Once you have created these separate lists, you can then go through your profile and filter out people that you don’t want to see particular information.  You can do this by hovering over the icon at the beginning of your post and selecting whether you want the content to be public or select a particular list for that information to be visible to ONLY.  You can do the same for photo albums, or bring up a particular photo and remove it from the timeline.  I still recommend setting default privacy settings on your account, but this allows you to further control who views particular posts with just one click.

I am going to quickly make mention of the fact that our Newsfeed has now been split into two – Top Stories and the “ticker” in the right.  Generally when one of your friends or a page that you like makes a post it will appear as a Top Story whereas if they merely comment or like someone else’s post it will appear in the ticker on the right hand side.  This definitely ups the ante for those using Facebook as a networking tool for business purposes as we now require people to “share” our posts rather than just like or comment.

Hint – Make your posts “share” worthy to reach beyond your likers.  Photos are being shown larger than before, pick an image with a striking visual effect and use this feature to your advantage!

Prior to these changes, people interacted with other people by becoming friends with each other.  We now have the option of “subscribing” to people as well as becoming their friend.  ”Friend” and “Subscriber” can be mutually exclusive, you can “unsubscribe” from that a friend (or control which of their updates you want to see)  or “subscribe” to someone that is not on your friends list.

The Facebook “Like” button has revolutionised how we recommend and share content, not just within Facebook, but on the web as a whole.  This innovation has been surpassed by the “Open Graph” project, where “Like” is joined by a whole team of other verbs, in fact how many verbs will only be limited by the amount of apps developed for Facebook, in other terms a google!

As we near information overload I say Open Graph is a post for another day!  I hope this information has been helpful in assisting your navigation through the changing face of Facebook, I welcome your feedback below.