Last night’s Developer’s Garage in Palo Alto gave the Facebook engineering team a chance to announce a some user interface changes and new features to a full house of developers. Here’s a quick recap of what went down:

1. Partnerships with Brightkite, Vimeo and Geni will allow FB users to avail themselves of these outside services without really leaving Facebook. The Vimeo partnership is a big deal as FB is obviously banking on it to become the preferred method for user video hosting. If the integration is smooth, we can expect to see a lot more of the Vimeo player.

How To: Create a Comments Box with Facebook Connect in 5 Minutes from Pete Bratach on Vimeo.

2. The new Facebook Comments widget will allow anyone to plug in a comments box into their site, blog, photo gallery with just a few lines of code. It’s essentially FacebookConnect lite. The comments entered in the widget box can be also be posted on and shared to FB profiles. Similar to blogs that employ FacebookConnect in their comments, anyone with a Facebook account can chime in on any site that has the Comments widget.

In between these announcements Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg came in, took the mike and said a few words about openness. He also spent a few minutes talking about the FB engineering team and how hard they’ve worked, which was the right thing to do in a room full of developers, and then he (probably) went back to work.

3. Feeds and Status updates are changing to look more personalized – which means no more quote marks around posted items. Images, videos, quotes and links can all be renamed and edited, so Status Updates just look better. More like a blog. More like a micro-blog. It’s interesting but for now it’s just a prettier face on the already existing system.

We’re betting that the concept of following and followers can’t be far behind.
There are lots of people who aren’t ‘friends’ whose feeds could be interesting to follow, but as it stands you have to be their ‘friend’ to see them. The wooden stake (assuming Twitter is the vampire) is going to be a private/public publishing option baked in to every feed. Could be a pain in the ass to get used to (as with every other change on Facebook, people will complain), but it could also make Facebook users . Facebook: The mega-micro-blog platform.

It’s good to see that Facebook is committed to helping developers monetize on the FB platform with the new Third Party Monetization wiki that’s going live today. The Facebook Flyer ad offering, also announced today, will be yet another way for developers to work with advertisers, giving them more monetization opportunity, which is always good for the community. Eric Eldon’s insightful Venture Beat article covers the news as well.

We’re big fans of the Facebook platform and they’ve been a great partner to us, as publishers and as a social ad network. We welcome Facebook into the multitude of great advertisers working on the platform including us, Platform A and Microsoft. Other advertisers listed on the Monetization wiki include Social Media, Adknowledge, VideoEgg and SocialCash, with additional listings for Affiliate Marketing, Analytics and Payment providers. We all operate with the agenda to win. RockYou’s performance as an ad network has maximized returns for the developers we work with, and as long as we all continue to do so the Facebook platform will continue to thrive.

RockYou ended up being a huge hit at yesterday’s Twiistup in Santa Monica.  We sponsored the event that brings together startups with investors, bloggers and industry insiders for one of the best nights of networking.  It was a fun night of drinks, seeing old friends, making new ones and ultimately, learning about the future of the tech world.

Photo by Mike Macadan

It seems our love for Twiistup is mutual because they also mentioned us on their blog http://www.twiistup.com/2009/02/12/rockyou-you-rock.  And just in time for Valentine’s Day!

Overall, it was a great night and we feel lucky to have been such an integral part of it!