At the f8 conference yesterday, Facebook released what may be its biggest platform update yet. The new version of Facebook, dubbed “Timeline”, is available to developers now, and will be rolled out to all users over the next several weeks. Timeline uses a complex algorithm to determine how important the content you post is to you, and ranks that content chronologically by importance. The new Profile page displays as one continuous stream – users are no longer required to click “See More” at the bottom of their profiles – which allows your friends to scroll through your entire life, only consuming the important parts and skipping over the less significant status updates.

Perhaps more significantly for marketers, Facebook released what can be thought of as iterations of the “Like” button. Recognizing that users will probably watch an order of magnitude more movies than they will ever Like, Facebook released new open graph protocol that allow users to simply “Watch” a movie (or “Hike” a mountain, “Bike” a trail, “Read” a book, etc.). This allows users to share interesting content with their friends, but without having to commit to frequent updates from brand Pages.

Apps, too, are seeing an overhaul. Now apps appear as widgets in a user’s profile. Spotify, for example, showed how they are integrating with Timeline by creating a Profile widget that shows what music a user is listening to right now (and what they have listened to in the past). This list updates automatically, without requiring users to frequently publish to their Walls. These updates won’t appear in a friend’s News Feed; instead, they will update on a scrolling ticker in the upper right corner of the screen that displays a feed of all of a user’s friends’ minor updates. The News Feed becomes less cluttered as a result, even though Facebook users will be sharing more content, in theory.

Facebook users will still be able to “Like” brands – Facebook hasn’t killed off that functionality, and likely will not. But it is important to understand that the ways in which users are likely to interact with branded content will change significantly. The emphasis for brands must be on creating avenues by which users can more completely tell stories – and in fact, Zuckerberg talked at some length during his keynote about how Facebook empowers its users to share not just what they’re doing right now, but the story of their lives. Content producers, too, should rethink their creative strategies specific to Facebook to ensure they are aligned with Facebook’s own value proposition, as Zuckerberg (re)defined it on Thursday.