When Facebook rolled out its new home page in March, many users were in an uproar. The real-time, chronological information stream created data overload for site members, at least compared to the previous, more selective stream. Facebook has since tweaked things a bit to bring back familiar old features, though not always as users remember them. But through all this tinkering, the home page's central information stream remains unchanged. Though my inner-curmudgeon doesn't want to admit it, now that I've adapted, I'm becoming a fan of that stream (but only after I finally opted out of my friends' Hangman, Hatchlings, etc. updates).

Many speculated that Facebook was remodeling itself to imitate Twitter, the popular microblogging site Joel McHale comically referred to recently as "the digital Macarena." This speculation probably isn't too far off the mark, given that Twitter has long featured a home page with chronological information updates. So why would Facebook, a site with a user community that dwarfs Twitter's, want to emulate a web service that Nielsen reports has only a 40% user retention rate.

The answer to that might lay in another far less publicized change by Facebook: Pages.

I think two posts on other sites combine to tell the whole story. The first, from Mashable.com, is titled You Might Not Love the New Facebook, But Brands Should. It highlights two changes: 1) Facebook's fan pages now emphasize social interaction and information updates, and 2) those information updates now show up on fans' home pages. Until recently, I used Facebook's fan pages for little more than fun. Given how often my friends become fans of such pages as "Sleeping," "Not being on fire," and "Spencer Pratt," I suspect I'm not alone in my frivolous use of this feature. However, now that Pages have status updates that display on my home page, I'm a little more discriminating in my fandom.

The second relevant post, from TechCrunch.com, is titled Rest in Peace, RSS. In this post, Steve Gillmor suggests that Twitter and its ilk have become a better source for breaking news and information than the RSS feeds he subscribes to in Google Reader:

Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed - whatever they grew from, they morphed into a realtime CMS for the emerging media. Twitter, not RSS, became the early warning system for new content. Facebook, not RSS, became the social Rolodex for events, casual introductions to RSS’ lifeblood, the people behind the feeds. FriendFeed, not RSS, captured the commentsphere. RSS got locked out of its own party.

Ignoring for now Gillmor's simplistic view of RSS's use (e.g., RSS quietly feeds a lot of that real-time data INTO the Twitter stream he so loves), Gillmor correctly observes that, for many of us, our first exposure to the day's hot topics comes not from headlines on NY Times.com or CNN.com, but from people talking about those headlines on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media tools. Or from the New York Times' and CNN's Twitter accounts. Case in point, on Monday morning I arrived at work, fired up TweetDeck, and discovered that everyone I follow on Twitter was talking about a new Kindle from Amazon. I then went straight to sites like TechCrunch and Read/Write Web to get the full story. An hour later, when I finally got around to catching up on my RSS subscriptions in Googe Reader, all the posts on those sites about the Kindle news showed up, but by then they were already old news.

So where do Facebook Pages fit into this? Simple. If Amazon creates an official company page on Amazon, and I become a fan of Amazon, when it announces the new Kindle on its page, that announcement appears on *my* home page. Or if I am a fan of TechCrunch. Or if I am a fan of CNN. Or if my friends are fans of any of those Pages, they might start talking about the announcement in their status updates. No matter how the information travels, it will spread like swine flue once it's released into the Facebook ecosystem.

While Gillmor believes this real-time news stream already exists in Twitter, Facebook has a much larger -- and stable -- user base for companies (or "Brands," as Mashable calls them) to market their products/information/events. Once these "Brands" enter the Facebook economy, the site stands to make far more cash than it did when the site was simply about your cousin posting pictures of her Grand Canyon vacation. But make no mistake, those Grand Canyon pictures still matter to Facebook. That's what keeps you *using* the site, even as the data stream to which you're exposed expands well beyond your friends and family.