f8 conference logoCatch the Facebook show and tell yesterday at F8? If so, you saw many changes to the Facebook timeline and more. A big goal of these changes is to make content (photos, music, personal data, etc.) easier to discover, experience, and make meaningful.

To us, these changes mean that the social network really is becoming the second major gateway to the Internet. The first big gateway to the Internet is search, mainly Google. Portals a la Yahoo!....not so much anymore. The future that's quickly becoming now is users will start their quest for content with either search or social.

In Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content, our own Colleen Jones saw this coming and explained why. A short snippet...

"I predict portals will keep declining as a gateway to the Internet...Social networking compensates for many drawbacks of portals. When friends and colleagues share content, it's more likely to be relevant. These friends and colleagues act like personal content curators."

In principle, the Facebook changes make it easier to discover content curated by your friends and easier to curate your own personal content. Genius.

Why should you care about the gateways to the Internet? Because planning for your content to work well for search is different from planning for it to work well in social networks. For search, your content has to be findable. For social, your content has to be sharable. And that's just for starters.

So, we think the Facebook changes are very smart in principle. We can't wait to see what happens in practice. And, we suggest planning for people to discover your content through social sooner rather than later.