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Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference took place in San Francisco, and of course, I wasn’t there.  (I was really hoping my FBML skills would be my ticket…*kidding*) Apparently Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who I’m fairly sure is younger than me) made all sorts of big announcements during his keynote address.

There’s tons of stories about the F8 Conference flying around on sites like Mashable, TechCrunch and The Next Web; so I thought I’d take a look at all the buzz and try to outline the highlights and what it means to the average Facebook user.

The “Like” Button

If you logged on to Facebook today, you probably saw a “Like” button at the top of the Fan Pages you frequent. Or, you may have seen an info box at the top of your home page that encouraged you to “Connect with your friends on your favorite websites” and “Like anything, anywhere.”

If you clicked the “Learn more” link in that info box, you saw that Facebook is expanding it’s empire by adding a “Like” button to sites around the web so that you can share those sites with your Facebook friends–and your Facebook friends can share sites they “Like” with you.

The new “Like” button will act as a social plug-in that websites can easily implement to give their users a more wholistic perspective of their site and the web in general.  Sound confusing? Let me break it down:

Say you’re on Yelp.com (one of the early adopters of the “Like” button feature) and you want to share a restaurant review with your Facebook friends…All you need to do is hit the “Like” button and Yelp will post that review to your Facebook wall and indicate that you “Liked” it.

Some websites may even integrate specific Facebook news feeds on to their own site.  Using the Yelp.com example, this means you may soon be able to see a news feed of Yelp reviews that your Facebook friends “Like” while you’re checking out other reviews on Yelp yourself.

Open Graph

As part of their quest to take over the world–er, I mean, in an effort to improve the social web–Facebook has created a platform called Open Graph that “allows sites and apps to share information about users in order to tailor offers, features and services to each one’s interests and tastes.”

How does Open Graph know so much about you? Well, because you tell Open Graph all about your interests every time you “friend” a celebrity, become a Fan of a business or join a group on Facebook.  And now, Open Graph is going to share that information with other sites.

So, getting back to the Yelp example (above), if you sign in to Yelp via your Facebook profile (similar to the way you can use your Yahoo! or Gmail log-ins to access certain sites), Yelp will be able to see any information about you and your interests that you’ve made publicly available and serve you information tailored to those interests (e.g.- If your Facebook profile says that you like Italian food, Yelp will start to serve you reviews for Italian restaurants in your area).

What about my privacy?

If you’re worried about your privacy, don’t.  No changes will be made to the current Facebook privacy agreement (which you may or may not be happy with) and Facebook will (supposedly) be giving you a number of options to manage the privacy of your own data on Facebook and other websites.

And honestly? Facebook and just about any other site you give information to already know a LOT about you, so I wouldn’t be too afraid of this new platform.  If anything, you might just stumble upon more useful information, more often.

*Image courtesy of lifeinthenhs.wordpress.com & Google images.