[This is a guest post by Vanessa Camones, CEO and Founder of theMIX agency, a digital marketing consulting agency.
get updates via her FB timeline or tweet @vanessacamones]- JF

On the first day of Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco, the world’s biggest social network presented a nonstop barrage of new features on top of those it had already rolled out or announced in the past week, even as Google cleverly opened its Google+ network to public signups a few days before Facebook’s conference. Facebook’s message onstage today was obvious: “We’re not going to sit still and be picked off. Take that, Google!”

In fact, several of the new features seem explicitly designed to match the best advantages not just of Google+, but of Facebook’s several biggest rivals in social networking. Friend Lists have been updated to look a lot like Google+ Circles. Former coworkers can tag each other’s past employers, a la linkedIn. And it’s now possible to follow a Facebook user’s status updates without first becoming their friend – just like Twitter.

Some of the features are obviously practical, such as the quick popup that lets you send a short Happy Birthday message to another Facebook user without having to visit their page, or the Events popup that saves you from having to troll through your own listings. But others make me wonder what they’re thinking at Facebook.

Start with the live ticker that constantly updates with messages like “Jane Doe likes John Doe’s status” and “John Doe commented on his own status, ‘Awesome.’” It seems to annoy nearly everyone with its constant motion and lack of anything important to say. Yet you can’t turn it off. I have to ask: Is this where the new ads are going to go? Likewise, the new Top Stories items at the top of my news feed are supposed to act “like your own personal newspaper,” one Facebook employee blogged. So far, my personal newspaper’s top stories are a pic of Mark Z with Andy Samberg of SNL. Five friends have shared the same photo. I doubt they’re quaking over at the New York Times.

Facebook seems to be at a crossroads. Having signed up more than 800 million members on the strength of seeing what their friends were up to, the company is now trying to pile on features that will make Facebook all things to all people – a newspaper, a job agency, a celebrity-watching site, a place to tell your life story with the new Timeline feature. Of course, people will complain about any change Facebook makes, but this week the cry is coming from all over: “Stop, it’s too much!” As one friend posted, logging into Facebook now feels like taking a multiple-choice quiz when all you wanted to do was post a cat photo.

In fact, Facebook’s latest update makes it look a lot like the portal sites – Excite, Lycos, MSN — that proliferated in the late 1990s. Most started as simple search engines, then added feature after feature, link after link, widget after widget to their pages until it was hard to find whatever it was you had come looking for in the first place. At the time, the conventional wisdom among business people was that these sites would become one-stop destinations, like Wal-mart or Home Depot, where Internet users would go for everything. Instead, users abandoned the portals for Google’s stripped-down search results and more focused, more segmented news and community sites.

Even more important, Internet users are moving away from browsers on big screens to mobile screens. Among the billions of Earthlings that Facebook has yet to sign up, many are in emerging markets where Internet consumers use only a phone and not a computer. Google and Apple have packed a lot of services into phones that Facebook has yet to match.

That’s Facebook’s challenge going forward: Can they pack all these new features into a mobile interface? Can they build apps that seduce mobile users, rather than daunting them with too many options and too much information? Because right now, even the Silicon Valley geeks I know are having a hard time figuring out what’s going on when they hit Facebook this week. If it’s off-putting on a 27-inch monitor, just imagine the experience on a Droid. If they’re not careful, Facebook could accidentally give users a reason to finally try Google+.