Facebook made some big announcements last week, including new Facebook Pages perfect for social media marketers, but it looks like users will now be able to reap the rewards of the much talked about real-time homepage features.

So what’s new for you? Apart from the tweaked look and feel of the page, there are quite a few updates that are going to change the way you interact with your Facebook home page, but most notably is the real-time stream of information and “The Publisher.”

As we’ve noted previously, the news feed stream will now consist of all real-time items being shared by your friends, so you can get instant glimpse of the social activity happening in you and your friends’ worlds. Also, Facebook’s increasingly popular status update box is getting refreshed, so The Publisher will ask users, “What’s on your mind?” and give them the ability to not just update their status but also attach links, photos, and videos to their updates.

The Highlights boxes in the right hand column have also been redesigned to show the most important activity happening over longer period of times, based on Comments, Likes, and other metadata. Think of Highlights as the counterparts to the real-time items flying by.

Facebook has also enhanced stream filters so members can use the filters on the left-hand side of the page to filter the updates for the people and content they want to read the most. The News Feed is the main filter, but users can add new filters based on Friends Lists and applications.

The new home page update is being rolled out to users starting today, so some of you can probably take advantage of the new features already, while others of you can continue to hit F5 and wait to see the change.

We’re excited about the updates to the user home page, but as we’ve mentioned before, Facebook is clearly making its content more digestible in real-time format which pits it directly against sites like Twitter and FriendFeed. With all the instant news items, commenting, and liking features, Facebook’s positioned nicely to keep members active and engaged on their site for the time being.

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