I was at the first f8 conference in San Francisco a few years ago, and the hope for Facebook’s platform was full of promise for businesses, including Facebook’s.  What I like about this year’s f8 keynote is that it’s new Timeline, Social Apps and Realtime Serendipity are full of promise for the users.  Facebook’s spent years building a platform around monetization, establishing a foundation to build social search, recommendations and an inside look at what users like doing.  But now Facebook’s finally giving that data and insight back to the end user.

The Timeline features a customizable scrapbook where content can be pinned to signify an important milestone in your life.  It separates the newsfeed and the realtime update stream from the notable occasions, but still enables a formatting option that spreads beyond the most recent content shared by your friends.  All we need to do now is make it searchable.

Then there’s the socialization of apps, which essentially automates your app activity and connects you with friends accordingly.  I’m not so impressed with this update as I am relieved, that Facebook was able to realize a dream so many of us users deem sensible for social network interaction.  You can view a friend’s Spotify activity and play a song directly.  You can see a friend’s Netflix viewing habits and begin watching the last movie they recommended.  Socializing apps is no longer about showing which friends have the same app, or even which friends like the same movie.  This type of deep integration brings more “app” functionality into the bowels of Facebook so you don’t have to remove yourself from the social experience in order to enjoy the same content.

Where data really gets put to work is in the Realtime Serendipity feature, which actionizes your updates and automatically contextualizes them on a social level.  It’s a discovery tool that recognizes patterns in all this social interaction taking place on Facebook, alerting you to similarities and letting you filter through them at will.  You can view by topic, media format or other parameter on a friend’s profile to discover what you want about them, making the profile a more fluid experience instead of a static representation of your interests.

I’m still a little hesitant on Facebook’s current methods of automating certain areas of integration.  For instance, I’m not too keen on my interests automatically being added to groups I follow and receive updates for.  And my alerts have gotten quite gunked up with all the irrelevant updates that have nothing to do with me directly.  So I’m hoping the Timeline, Social Apps and Realtime Serendipity follow a different path to user integration, making a more comprehensible journey for users as we approach the new Facebook design.

What I’m most looking forward to, however, is the long term ability to leverage these data sets Facebook is creating around actionized updates and interactions.  For a service that taps Facebook for its social graph to make its own site “friendlier,” it will now be able to make even better recommendations based on the connections established on Facebook, now applied to other areas.  Facebook’s on its way to learning a whole lot more about its users, and a great number of businesses will be able to take advantage of this.  My hope is that Facebook’s finally done it the right way this time, looking to its users for inspiration and allowing them to guide the process, instead of the business-driven decisions Facebook’s made in the past.  Beacon, anyone?