In the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote presentation at the Facebook developer conference, f8, last week, there are a few new words you will need to add to your FB lexicon – real-time serendipity, open graph and timeline. These are the three major changes (placed in order of business-relevance) that are going to be rolled out on Facebook over the next couple weeks.  Let’s take a look at what each of these changes is and what it means for your business.

Real-time Serendipity (launched immediately)

What it is: The ability for friends to know what you’re doing when you’re actually doing it as long as you’re doing it in a Facebook-integrated app.

What it means: Until yesterday, apps required a user to “like” something to have it post to his/her wall. For example I could “like” the song Paranoid Android by the band Radiohead on Spotify and it would post something like, “Andy likes Paranoid Android, by Radiohead (via Spotify)” to my wall and my friends’ News Feeds. With the addition of the ticker earlier this week users know what their friends are doing on Facebook exactly when they do it. With the changes made to Open Graph (more on that below), this real-time updating extends to apps too. Any app that is integrated with a user’s Facebook account will be allowed to post the user’s activity to his/her friends’ ticker feeds as it’s actually happening. So if I am listening to Paranoid Android on Spotify, the app will automatically show, “Andy is listening to Paranoid Android by Radiohead on Spotify” in my friends’ ticker feeds.

Though cool (if a little unnerving), that by itself is not a huge change, but what real-time serendipity allows users to do is actually join their friend’s experience by clicking on the ticker update. So if one of my friends clicked on my update in their ticker feed, they could enjoy the song along with me. Better still, if my friend doesn’t have the Spotify app, they can easily download it with one click. Real-time serendipity’s most apparent B2B value is in applications that allow consumption of media apps that deal with music, video and news. This is where the real opportunity is for businesses.

Because of other recent changes to Facebook, the site will become more and more popular for professional users, which means there will be more opportunities for B2B companies. One immediate opportunity that exists is for B2B companies in niche industries to offer branded industry news applications. As of this writing, if one of your business page’s Facebook fans is reading your content, nobody else in their network will ever know about it unless they “like” it or comment on it. That means that nobody in their network will ever see your company’s name or content. An open graph news application, however, could post updates to the ticker anytime a user reads any content within that application. And if any of the application’s user’s friends or coworkers also find that article interesting, they can click on the ticker update, download the app with one click, then read the same article. This will only become more powerful as users grow their professional networks on Facebook.

Open Graph (launched immediately in beta for developers)

What it is: There was a change made in the Open Graph programming protocol that enables the real-time serendipity.

What it means: Though the open graph protocol was established in 2010, there is a small, but significant change being made for the newest version that was launched at f8 (note: this new version is in beta testing). That small change (alluded to above) is that the protocol now allows for applications to collect data from their users passively and post it to their FB tickers. This function is what allows the above “Paranoid Android” example to exist without a user actually “liking” or commenting on something. Perhaps more importantly, the changes to the protocol make it a one-click process for users to download new apps that they see in their timeline. This should make it easy for good apps, or niche apps, to spread quickly and easily.

Timeline (rolled out over the next few weeks)

What it is: An online scrapbook of your life that is completely replacing the traditional FB “profile.”

What it means: The FB profile as we know it will soon be a thing of the past. Over the next few weeks your profile will become what is essentially a digital scrapbook of your life. Facebook will use all of your data from the past to highlight any major events in your life as you scroll down to the day you were born. Of course, those of you over the age of 7 did not have FB accounts when you were born. The new profile will allow you to add photos and events from your pre-Facebook past. That way, you can have a record of pretty much your entire life available to you and your friends online.  Timeline will be rolling out to selected users by invitation over the next few weeks and will eventually become mandatory.

Zuckerberg made no mention of business pages during the keynote so, at this point, the launch of Timeline itself will not have any apparent immediate impact on your B2B business page. The real impact of the addition of timeline will be in how creatively B2B businesses use apps to promote their company or products/services.

So that’s basically it. What do you think of all of the new changes? Are there any new business applications for Facebook because of the changes that you’ve thought of?