Watch the Zuckerberg keynote from
F8 conference 2011
First big change - a new profile design. It's main new feature is called "Timeline". It's more "designed" - lets you share big photos, and lets you tell the whole story of your life on a single page. It has a wall for the recent stuff, but it also lets you have a big header photo, a timeline to show the *most important* stuff, including photos, and important events. The same profile style even works on mobile.
The profile is meant to "represent you" in the way you'd represent yourself when you first met someone. Instead of just providing the last few recent things you did and basic info, the profile is now more geared towards telling your whole lifestory. It is *radically* different than the current FB profile. You can view photos by time, you can view a "map" view to see where you've travelled / been, but there's even more timeline views.
Here's the new FB profile photo. You can change the top photo whenever you want. You can highlight any story and feature it on your timeline as a big event. In other words, you can pin certain objects as cool/interesting to remain prominent, while the mundane instances of your life (where you ate, check-ins, etc. can just stream away).
The "Like" feature is being expanded to "Read," "Watch," "Listen," "Eat," -- in other words, the one-click option Like is being "opened up" so that developers can create actions. Sounds like Facebook will have some standard ones they've created (Read, Watch & Listen), but I think he's implying that app developers will be able to create their own words as well. And, as you can guess, this will work across the web as well. It won't just be on Facebook.
What if there's something you want to share but don't want to bug your friends? Facebook has worried that sharing activity was being minimized because people knew that it'd be sharing with all their friends, and possibly bugging them. That's the purpose of the "ticker" on the right (which you've already seen), to minimize less important things -- i.e. you won't have to think "this isn't such a big deal, I shouldn't share" -- instead, you can share anything and Facebook will only "feature" it to your friends when it becomes a top story.
About 10 or so music partners (Spotify, Rhapsody, etc.) have built music into Facebook. You'll see what your friends are listening to on the right ticker, and you can listen with them. Video companies like Hulu have done the same thing. You can watch a video on Netflix / Hulu and it'll show up in the right ticker and your friends can watch with you - i.e. see the same screen while you see it and you can (presumably) chat with each other while you watch. The whole idea is to ramp up "content discovery" and really rethink the music & video content industry. This is what the rumored "sharing explosion" has been about.
