At the F8 conference yesterday Facebook announced some major changes to the Facebook platform which were the biggest changes we have seen for a long time.  Facebook now have over 800 million users with over 500 million of them recently using Facebook in one day which was another milestone for Facebook.

One of the major changes is the addition of applications which allow you to read news, listen to music and watch movies within Facebook.  Facebook have partnered up with some key companies to allow them provide this functionality directly within Facebook and these applications are tightly integrated with Facebook making sure there is a big social element to these.

I believe that this is a big step forward for Facebook and we will see many more partnerships in these and other industries and this will make Facebook much more compelling to use.  The Facebook platform will continue to expand and will become the main application development platform for Social applications.   It makes perfect sense to develop on top of social technology already built that brings 800 million people with it!

Here are some highlights of some of the other functionality.

Facebook completely changed your profile so it now becomes a time line of events showing you a story of your life through Facebook.

Instead of just liking something you can now indicate you are watching something, reading something etc. Also this is taken out of your newsfeed and put into a rolling ticker. The newsfeed will be reserved for more interesting things. Have a look at the ticker relating to music and movies:

During Mark’s speech he talked a lot about Applications.  This is where the future growth of Facebook will come from.  Facebook will build out it’s platform allowing a whole new set of applications to be built on top of the existing platform. For example, Spotify, an online music subscription service, have built a spotify app that will sit within Facebook where users can listen to music, share what they are listening to and then listen to what their friends are listening to.  Music is social in it’s nature so it makes perfect sense that you explore new music through your friends within Facebook.  Similarly with a partnership with Netflix, you can watch video within Facebook, share out what you’re watching and watch what your friends are watching.  These partnerships are hugely important because it’s start of a whole new breed of social applications running within Facebook.

Watch out for more partnerships in other areas to be announced over the next few months.  It’s very exciting times ahead for Facebook.  Well done for Mark and his team for pushing the boundaries and keeping us on our toes.