You Need to Know About the New Facebook

It's been a big week for Facebook. After revamping some of the site's core features, the company hosted its developer conference in San Francisco yesterday and dropped some more bombshells. The whole experience on the site is about to change.

Facebook's new features mark a change in strategy. Last year Facebook set out to expand its reach by making some of its most popular features—mainly the Like button and commenting—ubiquitous on the Web. By spreading its Likes and comments to thousands of sites, Facebook further intertwined itself with the rest of our online existence, and its membership ballooned to a monolithic 800 million users.

Facebook New Look (Top Gadgets Review)

Now that Facebook's got us, it wants to keep us. Earlier this year CEO Mark Zuckerberg said increased user engagement was the goal, and that the number of users was no longer the key metric they were looking at. From the company's announcements yesterday, it's clear he wasn't just talking big in the wake of Google introducing its Facebook clone, Google+.

If there's a common theme in Facebook's new changes, it's keeping relevant experiences relevant. News feeds and profile pages are littered with the most recent information about you and your friends, no matter how inconsequential. Now a host of new features will work to highlight the most important experiences on the network.

Top Gadgets Review

At the same time, those more transitory updates ("Eating killer hot wings right now!!!") may no longer front and center, but they've been enhanced, expanding the activities they cover and becoming more real-time.

Facebook New Look Slideshow (Top Gadgets Review)