Whenever I do a post about Facebook, Google or Apple it only takes a few days for things to change radically. Today is no different!

This week at F8, Facebook’s yearly love-in and presso, Mark Zuckerberg stood on-stage and announced a wide range of sweeping changes to his beloved service.

Facebook are moving away from the social network that gives you a bullhorn (twitter) and is trying to provide a better platform for developers and people. I say people rather than statistics, advertisement viewers or anything else. This is because their new feature, Timeline, replaces the profile page entirely.

Unlike previous shifts in the past, Facebook always proposed itself as a platform to work with and use, but each update was evolutionary (not always for the best, too). Timeline is almost an entire re-thinking of their system. This is in-part a reaction to all of the various companies moving in on their territory, as well as their need to create a network that can stand on its own as a hub for everyone’s web presence.

Timeline is a far more personal affair than Facebook has ever allowed profiles to be. You can add your own “cover” to show people what you’re into at that time (mine now is a beautiful image of the Munich U-Bahn station at Trefoil). It’s not at the level of personalisation that Myspace provides, but that’s good. Myspace got so bad that you had to benchmark your computer before visiting some profiles thanks to the javascript, flash and GIFs.

More importantly for Facebook, it’s a more personal affair. Zuckerberg kept coming back to the notion of “telling your life story on Facebook”. This is a powerful sentiment. Keep getting punters back to update what they’re doing. It helps their photo section is updated (read as: ripped right from the Google+ handbook).

Importantly, this titanic shift in what Facebook is “for” means it doesn’t directly need to think of itself as in competition with Google+, because G+ is now suddenly different. At the same time, G+ dangerously feels more familiar to people than Facebook will when the new updates hit. This could potentially see a shift in userbase with people hating Facebook Timeline and wanting that “old, but kind of fresh” feel that Google will be more than happy to provide.

More than G+ though, Facebook is removing the mere notion of the “like” button and getting us to “read”, “listen” and so on, and so forth. This cuts into getglue and similar services as much as anything else. Moreso, it allows developers to push out better stats on what people do. Lots of people didn’t “like” my book, but they actually “read” it, etc.

As for the platform part, Facebook is trying desperately to push itself as a place for developers. How much so is yet to be seen. So far the platform bit has been dominated by Zynga’s Farm/City/Fish-Ville games as the primary platform dependent social applications. Facebook wants a proper app store to develop. They want Wunderlist, etc. The start of this comes with music, with the likes of spotify (which recently launched in the U.S.) coming onto the service. How integrated they’ll really be is yet to be seen. I reckon a lot of these music services (like spotify, soundcloud, lastFM, etc.) will try to use Facebook as a way to get hits out to their own sites, rather then letting users sit in Facebook’s ecosystem (looking at Facebook ads).

Below, by the way, is a picture of my current Facebook profile page. It’s a huge revolution in how they think Facebook acts, looks and is… but will their users like it?