So half of the United Kingdom has an account, with a good chunk of the world also posting status updates via the social network. But such exponential success can’t be sustained, can it?
Facebook, or, perhaps more accurately, Mark Zuckerberg, seems to think it can. After all, a company doesn’t announce a huge overhaul and introduce wholesale changes if it doesn’t want to retain its industry dominance, or build on that which has already been established. And with key regions such as Africa and Eastern Europe seeing internet access grow at a remarkable rate it’s not hard to see why the social network has a realistic chance of bagging a few hundred million more users over the next couple of years.
On Thursday September 22nd the f8 Conference took place, at which several comprehensive changes set to take place on Facebook were announced. The largest of which, Timeline, turns your profile into something that resembles more of a blog site, with a banner image and headline of your choosing, along with individual click through boxes to guide visitors through your history, images, updates and online activity. But it doesn’t end there.
The idea is that Timeline allows users to create a comprehensive life story, pre-dating Facebook and the opening of their individual account. Needless to say by promoting people to upload even more personal information the privacy police have been up in arms again, though that issue to one side we say the whole redesign, an example of which is picture above, looks nice and clean, something no doubt made imperative by a the launch of a recent, well-designed rival network. Confused? Check out this video for a more in depth explanation.

Secondly a whole new approach is being taken towards apps. This means that what started off as a simple update to inform you Mr X had just achieved a perfect irrigation score on his imagined pasture is set to take off in a huge way, in no small part thanks to integration with the likes of music discovery service Spotify, and streaming TV channels Hulu and Netflix, so now you can learn about new artists and shows by listening with your friends. Still looking for more clarification? Again we’ve embedded the following video to shed some more light, so take a look and see what you think for yourself. This also feeds into a concept being labelled ‘Patterns’, whereby actions like jogging, going to a bar, or watching a movie are automatically added to your timeline to give people a continually updated summary of yourself. Just What difference these changes will make remains to be seen, though one thing is for sure, this news is clear evidence that Facebook takes the Google+ threat very seriously indeed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3b94kFBah8&feature=player_embedded