At the end of October, Facebook rolled out a new roadmap for profiles and fan pages.  The uproar among the public has been relatively limited to privacy concerns, but the roadmap also raised the eyebrow of the page administrator and developer community.  Throughout the next year, FB will implement new policies for everything from tab width to Application bookmarking.  To help those engaged in social marketing we have outlined a few changes which every business or page administrator should be aware of.

Email Addresses

Why not start with the best news for page administrators.  According to FB, they will soon roll out an option
 that will allow Facebook page administrators and applications to ask for and collect the email addresses of their fans and users.  For the business and non-profit community, this option will create new opportunities to expand your supporter communications.  The new option will be rolled out in mid-January and according to Facebook:

We're excited to announce that you will soon have the ability to ask users for their primary Facebook email addresses, providing you with a direct channel to communicate with your users. This will also serve as a replacement for application-to-user notifications. (We think that Counters and the new News functionality will serve as a better replacement for user-to-user notifications.)

Notifications

With the addition of e-mail address capture comes changes to application notification.  According to FB:

We're removing application-to-user notifications and user-to-user notifications. Instead, we encourage you to use other channels to communicate directly with your users, and to enable them to communicate with each other about your application

According to Facebook the notification changes will occur "approximately 30 days after you are able to start requesting a user's email address. (Latest estimate: Early 2010)

Updates and Stream
Facebook will allow pages and applications to send targeted updates as well as posting stories to the stream.

Application News
Facebook will roll out an application news platform allowing you to communicate with users while they are exploring the application dashboard.  The news option will also have a per-user targeting option.
Boxes Tab & Profile Boxes

Early in 2010, Facebook will eliminate profile boxes, application info sections and the Boxes tab from user profiles.  This move will certainly anger the overall FB community and presents a challenge to developers whose only outlet of free profile advertisement will be an application tab (since many users simply don't like cluttering their profile tabs). 

The removal of profile boxes and the boxes tab also presents a design and navigation challenge to page administrators and developers.  For instance, I utilize a profile box on many pages I developed to create an index of links to organization websites and other social media outlets.  Since many visitors to a page only scan the Wall, it will present a definitive design challenge.

Facebook has stated they are researching additional methods of page and application integration into fan profiles, but it is likely that the planned "early 2010" rollout will occur before an alternative is developed.

Profile and Page Tabs

According to FB:

Application tabs will be the only way to integrate applications into profiles and Pages. Application tabs will shrink from 760 pixels wide (today) to 520* pixels wide to accommodate a slightly revised design. Boxes, info sections, and the Boxes tab will be removed in the near future.

News feed and Stream

In the past all content shared by a friend or page appeared in the stream by default.  However, the growing popularity of pages and abusive posting by some page administrators has led to changes in how pages appear in the streams of fans.  Many fans have hidden page posts and the changes are directly meant to free up bandwidth while assuring that pages with meaningful content continue to be viewed in the stream.  Facebook has implemented a new algorithm that determines what appears for each user, meaning that stream exposure is no longer guaranteed.

Exposure on fan streams will be based upon how many people like your posts, how many fans share your content, how many fans visit your page and which pages fans interact with frequently.  If users want to see all page updates they will need to click on the Pages option on their left hand filter.

Why?

The changes Facebook is implementing over the next year are a direct result of ad revenue and server capacity.  The changes much of the development community upset, but for now we must prepare for these changes and adapt to these changes.