As expected, Facebook made some pretty big announcements at their F8 conference this week. We asked our development lead, Morley Zhi, for an analysis of the changes and what opportunities these present for our clients.  Here’s a quick rundown of the changes:

The Open Graph

With its development of the Open Graph API, Facebook is giving publishers a toolset for connecting content on their sites with Facebook in a more integrated fashion.  In general, the social plug-ins are extremely useful but almost completely un-customizable; for now they’ll look exactly like they look on the preview page.

The Graph API looks like it has much of the same functionality as Facebook Connect, but all the API calls can happen on the PHP side instead of the Javascript side, which gives us more flexibility and makes it faster for the end user.  What that means in English:  the new API works like Facebook connect, but is a lot more elegant.

Some of these new tools are drag-and-drop and don’t need any backend integration and the rest require some backend work on the same level of work as implementing Facebook Connect. We’ve separated the reviews by type.

Like Button & Like Box

Instead of becoming Fans, users on Facebook will now “Like”Pages on Facebook, as well as sites and sub-pages elsewhere on the web.  Off-Facebook “Likes” will permanently link the liked web page to the user’s profile.

Activity feed

This shows the five (or so) most recent Facebook actions that occur on a site (i.e. people liking or sharing sub-pages of a website). It’s pretty useful and easy to set up, it also reports all activity on your domain.  This is a great tool for sidebars and homepages and other places with a site-wide context. Each entry is what a person does, as opposed to…

Recommendations

This shows the top 5 or so pages on a domain, ranked by how many people like or share each. Again, this is a good tool for sidebars or homepages.

Comments

This brings a comment board to any page. It’s especially useful because Facebook introduced an API call that lets you see all the comment boards you used, so we have more options for administering the boards. There’s no spam protection though, which makes it less useful than a  Wordpress as a commenting system, which blocks spam.

Live stream box

This is the same live stream box and has not changed.

Login with Faces

This just pretties up the FB Connect login button with friends who are also on the site. This creates a social incentive for users to sign up if their friend’s already have. Using this unit means implementing Facebook Connect.

Facepile

This is just Login with Faces without the Login button.

As we discussed here, The age of the Community page is upon us. Around 3:30 today, Mashable posted three important clarifications:

Community pages will aggregate user content:These community pages aren’t run by individuals, so they don’t have a wall and don’t send updates to users’ feeds. Instead, they import streams of related, public content from user status messages.

Status text is split into updates from friends and updates from all Facebook users. E.g., if I write in a status update to everyone, “I love this new hip hop album,” Facebook recognizes the term “hip hop” and imports my public update to the hip hop community page. Community Pages also include relevant information from Wikipedia under a Wikipedia tab.

User profiles connections to pages will be more prominent…oh, and Facebook will recommend pages based on your profile.

With today’s changes, “liked” pages and community pages can be linked to user profiles in categories of the “Likes and Interests” section of the profile. Instead of being merely static text, the profiles can display links to active community or brand-owned pages. Each page’s link will open up a hovercard with more information on the page. The pages you already like will be linked to your profile in the appropriate category, such as music or movies, and interests you’ve stated can be linked to related community pages.

Also, users will be given additional privacy controls.

Of course, since information around pages is public, privacy and sharing settings for these new settings are editable. In a new profile editing workflow, users will be given page suggestions when they add text to their profiles. Pages can be dragged and dropped from the profile, or even hidden if the user doesn’t want his profile to be a billboard for that particular page.And privacy settings will be changed, as well, for “friends, tags and connections” so users have more control over who sees what areas of their profiles, including friends lists, cities and pages.