At Thursday’s f8 conference in San Francisco, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg introduced multiple new features and changes which are aimed at making Facebook even more engaging. So here is a guide to some of the most important features and modifications upcoming to Facebook and what they will mean for you.

1. You are Going to Get a Timeline — a Scrapbook of Your Life

In an effort to entirely revamp the profile page, Facebook is introducing a new feature called Timeline. Facebook describes the new Timeline as “The story of your life”.

  • All your stories
  • All your apps
  • A new way to express who you are

Timeline fundamentally makes it simpler for users to concentrate on a particular window of time to get a good picture of your activity throughout the period in your life. Users will now have a more control over their profiles and even they will have the facility to customize their own Timelines in order to reflect their qualities and lifestyles Timeline is in beta now and will be available soon.

2. Facebook “Read” Button

Contrasting to the” Like” button which provides you a way to openly share individual pieces of content; this Read button would enable third-parties to add a single button to their website to facilitate some of the automatic actions. For example, if we integrate the “Read” button on TechieApps, this button on the page that when clicked by any user (John), enables them to automatically permit their facebook’s friends to know when they are reading TechieApps. In the new Ticker area of Facebook, a message will appear “John is reading TechieApps”.

3. You can Watch TV and Movies, Listen to Music and Read News with your Friends — All Within Facebook.

One of the most interesting features introduced yesterday is that you can now watch movies, videos or TV serials along with your friends without leaving your Facebook’s page. On the newest new version of the network, attractive patterns will be highlighted and instantly available. So if you observe that eight of your friends are watching “Glee” on Hulu, you can click and watch the same along with them without leaving your Facebook’s page.

4. Facebook Apps Need only Ask Permission Once to Share Stories on your Behalf

Even though this is not a big deal as the Timeline is, this twist can be one of the most controversial features. Formerly, apps had to request every time they shared information about you in your profile. From now onwards, the very first time you approve the app, it will inform you what it is going to share about you with your friends. If you are satisfied with that, then that app will never request you again.

But you don’t have to worry about this app stuff clogging your news feed, because …

5. Getting Ticked Off

You don’t desire to observe these kinds of news of your friends in your news feed:  relationship status change, pics from a wedding or a vacation, status updates etc. So this sort of unimportant detail has been thrown out to the Ticker, an instantaneous list of things your friends are posting will scroll down the side of your screen. Zuckerberg further clarified that the Ticker is used to articulate “lightweight activities,” like commenting on a photo or friends liking some content.

6. You Don’t Have to Just Like Something — Now you can [verb] any [noun]

Remember when all you could do to something on Facebook — a video, a comment, a product, a person — was Like it? Pretty soon that is going to appear pitifully old-fashioned. Facebook has launched Gestures, which means that Facebook’s associates and developers can twist any verb into a button.

So you will begin seeing the choice to notify others that you are Reading a particular book or watching a movie, or listening to a certain tune. As many spectators have pointed out, this is probable to guide to a bang of over sharing and far more information of your friend’s actions showing up in your news feed than you possibly be concerned to be acquainted with.

7. Facebook has More Users and More Engagement Than Ever

Zuckerberg revealed two fascinating chunks of information also. First one is that Facebook has hit 800 million users and the majority of them are active and the second one is that Facebook has just saw a new record for the most number of visitors in a day: 500 million visitors in a single day.

Certainly, the thought left by the announcements made in F8 conference was that of a fast-evolving, positive, corporation which is becoming even more proficient in their strategies and their site’s functionality and these announcements have made even more fascinating to witness what Google+ can do to keep up.