Rumors were flying in the run-up to f8: would Zuckerberg push the limits of online privacy even further? Would the Like button go belly up? Would Facebook take over the entire Internet? In the days since the developer conference took place, we have had time to ponder the ins and outs of Facebook Timeline and the Ticker and frictionless sharing. Are you now wondering what in the world is frictionless sharing? Read on, my friend. All will be explained.

If you could point to one thing that inspired the latest batch of Facebook changes, it would have to be Zuckerberg’s Law. That is, the amount of information that people share on Facebook – links to articles, songs, photos, videos, baby animals, et cetera – doubles every year. This makes sense, even if the logic is rather circular, because every year or so Facebook enables us to share so much more than we previously could.

To wit: photos and tagging first came to Facebook in 2005, status updates arrived in 2006 as did the News Feed, the Like button appeared on Facebook in 2009, and the button became available for use on other websites in 2010. In order to continue this sort of exponential growth, however, Facebook needed to make sharing even easier, and in that light, clicking the Like button started to seem too difficult. Thus, frictionless sharing was born.

The idea here is that Facebook automatically does the sharing for you. Every article you read in The Washington Post or The Guardian, every song you listen to on Spotify, and every video you watch via Hulu or Netflix will appear in your Ticker (more on that in a minute) for your friends to see. Of course, you have to authorize this frictionless sharing for each website first, but imagine the time you’ll save thereafter. No more hunting for that little blue thumbs up, no more cumbersome copying and pasting of URLs. Frictionless. Thankfully, for those of us who sometimes (okay, frequently) like to indulge in the latest tabloid gossip, there’s an option to pause this feature and keep certain actions private.

Now that the amount of information we’re sharing is on the rise, there is also need for a new way to consume it. Imagine trying to track down all that frictionless sharing yourself! Clever Facebook delivered a solution to this problem a few days before f8 in the form of the Ticker, a box in the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook profile that constantly updates itself with real-time news. There you can see what your friends are reading/listening to/watching while they’re doing it. And since the Ticker contains all the minutiae of people’s online habits, the News Feed has become the destination for premium content. Facebook is now using more advanced algorithms to select the Top Stories for your News Feed. These may not be the most current news items, but they are supposedly the most interesting and relevant for you.

You also may have noticed, while skimming your new News Feed, that some of your friends now have an unusual-looking profile. Welcome to Timeline, Facebook’s re-conception of the user profile. The sleek, customizable page with its large feature photo looks more like a personal blog than a standard Facebook profile. Thanks to OpenGraph API functions and the developers that use them, you can further personalize your page with widgets that will deliver updates based on your activities in various apps. The rest of the Timeline is made up of two columns containing – in chronological order – all the photos, status updates, Likes, comments, friendship requests, relationship changes, and other activities that you have ever posted in your history on Facebook. Are you curious to know what you thought of a certain YouTube video that went viral two years ago? Just click to that portion of your Timeline to find out. Don’t be disappointed, though, if you see that you wrote something like: lol crazy vid – i luv it! In hindsight we often prove to be less witty than we might have hoped. The Timeline is not yet finalized, so if you manage to get your hands on a developer’s version, you should expect some bugs.

To close, a quick word about the Like button. Companies large and small, and yes – grasundsterne is one of them – have spent the better part of the last two years encouraging employees, customers, and Facebook users to Like them. The recent changes, however, mean that in the future, businesses will have to do a lot more than accumulate Likes to stand out amidst the constant stream of updates.  How do you think businesses will make use of the new Facebook features like the Ticker and frictionless sharing to connect with clients and customers?