Facebook started rolling out updates to batches of user profiles since last Thursday to prevent a system crash, and I had the new updates on my profile the same day, but I didn't get time to test drive them until Saturday afternoon. I kept seeing status updates of how people didn't like the updates and some were demanding to have the old Facebook back, or an option to opt out of the updates.

Working with software, I have come to realize that people do not like change, no matter how good it is, and you sometimes have to ram it down their throats. They will throw tantrums and call your mother names for a few days, then everything will be back to normal in most cases, Microsoft and the Vista debacle being one of the few exceptions, but that's a whole other story. Appearance will always be a subject of debate, so I will focus here on functionality. 

5. Threaded Live News Feed

The Live News Feed is not a new feature but the layout has been improved. The feed now has larger font for the feed items and smaller fonts for comments on an item giving a better thread layout. The Feed also has slighly larger profile pictures with rounded corners giving it a more polished feel. The 'Like' feature has been there for a couple months. The Live Feed creates more activity but it may turn out to be a problem for users who have many active friends when their home page gets flooded with updates.

4. Enhanced Feed/Content Filtering

The Feed filters previously appeared as tabs above the feed, but they are now buttons located on the left of the page with more filter content type options, allowing the user to filter by Photos, Notes, Links, Network, etc. There are also new filter options on the profile page allowing the user to view feeds from friends only, their own feeds or both. This may help reduce the aforementioned  flooding problem from the Live Feed.

4. Enhanced Content Creation

Another feature somewhat tied to the content filter above, is improved content creation. In the previous version, the user had to be in their profile page to upload pictures, post links, videos, etc. Clicking a filter from the home page now provides a content creation form at the top of the page, such as taking a photo or uploading files, posting links, notes, videos, etc. depending on the content type filter you clicked. Clciking the Photos filter for example displays a Photo upload box.

3. Integration With Other Social Networks

The more significant updates, in my opinion are less visible to the average Facebook user. As a highly networked person and a user of multiple specialized social networks like YouTube for videos, Digg and Reddit for media, Last.fm for music, Del.icio.us and Stumbleupon for social bookmarking, Twitter for microblogging, Flickr for photo sharing, etc, it has always been a pain to share my content across networks. There are many attempts at aggregating social networks, but the ones I have tried didn't quite deliver what I was looking for.

Twitter worked well previously and I was able to update my status via Twitter, but beyond that the rest had to be done manually. There was a box for Digg and Last.fm, but these were clumsily hidden in the 'Boxes' in the profile page.

Feeding content from other netwroks to you profile can be configured by clicking 'Settings' from the profile page. The currently available networks that I use are YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, Google Reader, Stumbleupon, Last.fm and Hulu (not sure if this qualifies as a social network). Here are the results of my tests on some of the services.

YouTube:

Favoriting videos on YouTube adds them to the feed and embeds the video. This is awesome! I haven't posted any new videos or playlists but I am assuming this will also do the same. I have not tested posting comments on videos, but this may also be added to the feed.

Digg:

Digg is a social media site that allows users to submit and upvote (digg) links to stories. The most popular stories appear on the front page based on a complex, sometimes controversial algorithm. Digging stories adds them to the Facebook Feed and creates a link to the story. I haven't submitted any new links to Digg, but these should also appear in the feed. I have not tested comments on Digg submissions.

Del.icio.us:

Del.icio.us is a social bookmaarking aoolication. Adding the feed pulled some recent bookmarks, and new bookmarks created appeared in the feed with a link to the bookmarked page.

StumbleUpon:

Stumbleupon is also a social bookmarking application. This works exactly like Del.icio.us with recent links being imported and new links appearing in the feed.

Flickr:

Flickr didn't import any of my recent photos and I didn't get a chance to upload new photos, but I saw Flickr feeds from some of my friends, so this should also be working as expected.

Hulu:

Hulu was a bit of an upset. I tried watching, rating and queing shows, but they didn't appear in the feed. I will try to play with this again, maybe there is something I am not doing right.

Last.fm

I currently use Last.fm with Banshee media player and I consider it to be one of the best uses of social networking. The Last.fm feed includes liked songs and songs added to library. I noticed that when there are more than 5 items in the Feed, Facebook groups them as 'and more' and provides a link to my Last.fm profile page. I haven't had more than 5 feed items in the other network Feeds, but I am assuming they will have the same behavior. I think it would be better if the link of the netwrok name on each feed item actually linked to your profile page on that network instead of the homepage. 

Twitter:

The Facebook Twitter application is actually independent and is not built into Facebook but has to be added by the user to their profile. I currently have my Twitter linked to my Facebook status and a Twitter 'block' on my blog, with twitter posts posts updating my status and appearing in the block. There doesn't appear to be any change on this application.

Reddit:

Reddit works in much the same way as Digg, but I have been finding myself spending much more time on it lately. Like Twitter, the current facebook Reddit application is independent but I was not able to link to my Reddit account the last couple times I tried, and this still appears to be unresolved.

1. Blog/RSS Feed:

My favorite new feature is the integrated Blog/RSS feed reader. I had tried to add my blog RSS feed to Twitter, but this didn't work very well and other RSS applications I tried only created an inconvenient box for the feeds. Allowing blog posts, photo uploads and any content updates that are available via RSS to appear on the Facebook Feed is jus awesome. This does not currently seem to have any form of verification and a user can post any RSS feed from any site leading to spamming.

UPDATE: 03-16-2009: There is either a glitch or Facebook has realized the spamming problem and most external feeds are now not appearing on the home page, but only on the user profile. I saw this coming.