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Facebook’s been evolving right before our very eyes. It started back in March, when Facebook rolled out a new homepage design and redesigned Facebook Pages. At the same time, they started announcing changes to open up the platform: public profiles, profile fans, public status updates, real-time search, and earlier this morning, Facebook Lite. Facebook’s been busy.

All of this is part of a process we sometimes describe as Twitterification. Facebook is opening up in parts in order to combat Twitter – another reason why Facebook completed that blockbuster acquisition of FriendFeed. But since these privacy and profile changes have occurred in parts, they have created a lot of confusion.

That’s why we have written this guide to Facebook’s most recent changes to profiles, status updates, and privacy features. We highlight the big changes and explain what is likely to come next. Here’s how the new Facebook is set up:

Profiles

In terms of privacy, there have been two major changes. The first one, which occurred back in March, is that you can make your Facebook profile public. You can make all elements or just parts of your profile public: photos, details, videos, work information, etc. This can be managed in Facebook’s profile privacy settings.

The other major change to profiles, announced in June, is the ability to have profile fans. It’s just like Twitter followers: they will be able to see your updates and info without you friending them. This feature is not yet launched, but will be coming soon:

Status Updates

Status updates have also changed. In the past, only your friends could see your publish posts and status updates (you know, that big “What’s on your mind?” box at the top of the homepage). But as of June, you have the ability to post status updates not only to your friends, but to friends of friends, to your networks, and to everyone. You may need to activate it in your Facebook profile privacy settings.

You’ll also notice that there’s a custom setting. You can post status updates just to specific friend lists. For example, post a personal update just to your top 20 friends, or you can let everyone on Facebook find your update about your big tweetup next week.

The change brings it more in line with Twitter, which is public by default. Really though, this was the prelude to yesterday’s big Facebook Search launch.

Realtime Search

As we covered in-depth yesterday, Facebook is currently rolling out realtime search. While the old search only could find things like apps, groups, and people, the new search is like a beefed-up version of Twitter Search. The new search crawls the last 30 days of news feed activity – photos, notes, images, videos, links, and status updates – and lets users search them all by keyword. Want to learn more about the FriendFeed acquisition or chatter about Mashable on Facebook? The new search helps:

So where does Facebook privacy play into all of this? The search covers all of your friends, but on top of that, it searches all public profiles and public status updates. So if you want to be found in search, you better change your Facebook privacy settings. Remember though, what you say will be visible to everyone then, so don’t say anything you wouldn’t discuss on your public Twitter feed.

What’s Next?

Facebook’s many new features can all be described with one word: openness. It has seen Twitter steal the spotlight and the attention, especially when breaking news and world events occur. Facebook, with its hundreds of millions of users, should be able to do the same thing, but cannot due to the network restrictions that have existed since Facebook’s inception as a college social network.

Facebook will encourage all of its users to join in on the world conversation by opening up their profiles, making their status updates public, and promoting its new realtime search tool. It will also promote users having conversations around news items – a la FriendFeed. The acquisition provides Facebook with a lot of technology that focuses on realtime updates, public conversations, and in-depth discussions. You will see integration with the world’s largest social network very quickly. FriendFeed may even become the model for public discussions on Facebook.

Luckily, you have a choice in these matters. If you want to keep your Facebook profile private between you and your closest friends, you can – just adjust your privacy settings to your network of friends. However, as Facebook opens up more and more, the pressure to open up your profile will increase as well. So prepare yourself for a new Facebook, one that intends to take down Twitter and even give Google a run for its money.

Tags: facebook, twitter

Life moves pretty fast. Sometimes it moves so fast we just don’t have time to stop and maintain all of our social networks individually. But that’s no reason to leave your Facebook profile barren, because you don’t even have to make it all the way to Facebook to update your status.

Here are some methods of updating your Facebook profile when on the go or while using some of the other networks and services you already use.

Update Facebook from Firefox

An easy to use Firefox extension called FireStatus can enable you to update your Facebook status right from a collapsible tray at the bottom of your browser. It also includes a URL shortening function as well, and you can set whether you’d like tinyURL or urlBorg as your short URL service in the preferences.

FireStatus can also handle updates to Twitter, FriendFeed, Delicious and Identi.ca as well, making it a handy method for updating any of those services if you’re already in your browser.

Update Facebook from Twitter

There are a few ways to pipe your Twitter status updates right into Facebook, avoiding the need to double post items or spend a ton of time maintaining a dual-life on both networks.

Twitter to Facebook – This Facebook app simply sends all your Twitter updates right into Facebook as status updates with one important exception: @reply tweets will not appear.

Selective Twitter – If you’re looking for more manual control over exactly which Twitter updates make it over to Facebook, you might want to try this app instead. It only sends tweets at Facebook status updates if you include the hashtag #fb at the end of your message.

Twitter clients – Once you’ve set up either of the above Facebook apps to pipe Twitter into Facebook, you can of course use any desktop or mobile Twitter client to continue updating your Facebook status as well.

Update Facebook from Text Messages (SMS or MMS)

Facebook has mobile services built right in, making it easy to both send status updates in and get information back out to your phone. To enable posting from your phone, go to the Mobile tab under your Account Settings. You’ll have to Add a Phone number to associate it with your account and begin sending status updates, so click on the Add phone number link.

You’ll be prompted to choose your carrier, then send a text message to Facebook from your phone. The Facebook mobile number is 32665 (FBOOK), which you’ll probably want to add to your contacts list for easy retrieval. Facebook will send back a confirmation code when it receives your SMS, which you then enter into the next step.

After successfully linking your mobile phone to your account, you can begin sending status updates to 32665. You can also modify the type and frequency of text alerts sent back to your phone when friends interact with your profile or send you messages, and set whether or not you want to receive confirmation messages when updating from your phone. You can even turn off all the incoming text alerts and still continue to send your own status updates to Facebook.

To send photos or videos by MMS, you essentially want to follow the protocol in the email section below. Find your personalized upload email address and use that as the recipient for your MMS message, and you can send media right from your phone to Facebook.

Update Facebook by Email

Facebook added a way for you to send photos or videos to your profile page via email. You can find your unique personal upload email on the Facebook mobile page. Simply attach the photos or videos you’d like to send in your email, and use the subject line as the caption (if you upload more than one piece of media at a time, they will all get the same caption). By default the media you send will be incorporated into your “Mobile Upload” photo album, subject to its privacy settings.

Thanks to commenters Robert Basil and Andrew for pointing out that there’s another great option that could belong either in this category or in the status update services section below: Posterous is another excellent service that will easily update several social services including Facebook by email.

Update Facebook from Status Update Services

Status update services are emerging out of the swelling sea of social sites and the growing need to manage them all. These sites typically store your login credentials for all the networks you participate in, and allow you to update any or all of them in one fell swoop. They can save you the time updating lots of individual sites when what you really want is the same message broadcast multiple places.

Two very full-featured offerings in this category are ping.fm and hellotxt. Of the two, hellotxt has been around longer (since 2007), although ping.fm has grown fairly popular in its own right. Both services offer posting to dozens of social networks from a number of different sources, so you may simply want to try both and decide which one you like best.

Update Facebook from Instant Messenger

This is a simple solution, because it’s the same as the previous section. You can use either ping.fm or hellotxt to send updates to Facebook from your instant messenger client. Typically you’ll add a special chat bot that you need to send messages to in order to update your Facebook status. Services supported include AOL Instant Messenger, Gtalk / Jabber, Yahoo Instant Messenger, and MSN.

Update Facebook from Third-Party Sites

The number of sites that support sending updates to Facebook either through the API or as an application continue to grow every day. If it’s a service you use frequently and want to pipe into Facebook, it’s worth investigating whether the site supports it, provides an app, or whether a third-party has developed a connector app to link the two services.

Just a few of the sites and services that can be connected to your Facebook page include Pandora, Wordpress via Wordbook, last.fm (you might want to try their What I’m Listening To app for a simpler method as well), Flickr, Qik, Ustream, gamerDNA, Raptr, and more.

Additionally, almost anything that outputs an RSS feed can be imported to your Facebook profile via the Notes application. Any time you update that site, service or feed, it will also then be displayed on your Facebook profile.

Just take care about which sites you route into each other, in case you inadvertently end up double posting (or worse!) items to your feed. Take a few moments and plan out which services you think your Facebook friends would even care about as well — it’s not necessarily the best idea to dump absolutely everything you do everywhere into your profile. But used thoughtfully and in moderation, you can keep an active Facebook profile going without exhausting yourself trying to keep all your networks updated on your every thought and breakfast selection.

Have any other useful tips for posting to Facebook without going to Facebook? Are there other Facebook tips you’d like to see here? Let us know in the comments!

More Facebook resources from Mashable:

- 20+ Great Greasemonkey Scripts for Improving Your Facebook Experience
- 10 Fantastic iPhone Apps That Use Facebook Connect
- The Journalist’s Guide to Facebook
- Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference?
- HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook

Tags: facebook, facebook tips, hellotxt, MMS, ping.fm, SMS, status updates

Just hours after we broke the news that Facebook had acquired FriendFeed comes Facebook’s announcement that it’s deploying its improved search product to everyone. This improved search functionality, which has been in testing since June, gives users the ability to search through shared media and status updates from their friends and the Pages they follow. And, perhaps more importantly, it lets users search through updates shared to ‘everyone’. The gloves are off — Facebook is going after Twitter where it hurts.

The new search will be a breath of fresh air to anyone who has previously tried to search Facebook for, well, anything. Under the old system, users had to browse through clunky categories to find their results, and there wasn’t a way to search though status updates or shared items at all. Now you’ll be able to simply click through different tabs on the left side of the page to jump between different categories, much as your would jump between Friends List on the Facebook News Feed. Another change is the way Facebook lets users ‘Search The Web’ — now these results are shown as a filter, rather than on their own page. And Facebook has also changed the search engine from Live.com to Bing, Microsoft’s rebranded and improved search engine.

These changes are especially important because search has long been one area where Facebook fell well behind Twitter. Twitter Search has become an amazing tool for finding the most up-to-date information on a variety of topics, including everything from breaking news to movie reviews. Facebook has slowly been making headway in this area by allowing users to share status updates with ‘everyone‘ (before that only your friends could see status updates). But until now there hasn’t been an easy way to actually search through those public updates, which made the feature useless to most people.

Now you’ll be able to jump over to Facebook search, click ”Posts By Everyone” and use it in much the same way you would use Twitter Search. You’ll see a list of matching updates from other users on Facebook, and a message at the top of the screen will update in real-time, alerting you as new updates containing your query come in.

For the time being it looks like Facebook isn’t promoting the feature too heavily — the ‘Posts By Everyone’ is the last item in the list of search filters, and I suspect that Facebook has relatively few users who are sharing their updates with the public in the first place. That will likely change soon though, as Facebook is planning to roll out a new suite of privacy options that will suggest that users begin sharing some of their data publicly.

Facebook’s 250+ million active users still dwarfs Twitter’s userbase, so even if only a small fraction of them begin using these new features, it won’t be hard for Facebook to become a serious contender in the real-time search race.

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