While cruising the web feeds today, I got wind that Facebook is launching a fresh new design next week. The new page is streamlined and looks more refined and elegant in its presentation – very “2.0″ as my contemporaries like to say. What’s up with the new view? According to their official announcement:

We’ve updated our home page to make it easier to understand what’s going on with the people you care about. Now your friends’ posts are streamed in real-time and you have more control over what you see.

The new Facebook features better filter control, real-time streaming of posts in the news stream and revised publisher settings so its easier to post links, photos, videos and more. Here’s a summary of the publisher improvements:

• Link (add a web address to external content)
• Photos (upload a photo, create an album, or take a webcam photo)
• Video (upload a video or record a webcam video)
• Note (add from Facebook’s Notes application)
• Import (add external blogs or RSS feeds)
• Gifts (add from Facebook’s Gift Shop)

I must admit I’m excited to see the changes. Facebook’s interface is rather cumbersome when adding  any external items, so this new interface is a welcomed improvement. I really like the sleek new skin and realtime updates without hitting the refresh key is just pure candy in my book. Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg sums it up brilliantly in his blog.

There’s an interesting blog post in the LA times that states that Facebook’s changes are a means to combat the growing popularity of Twitter. Well duh, these two have been the only real players in the networking game for some time now. It was only a matter of time before Facebook behaved more like Twitter or vice-versa.  It will be interesting to see how Twitter will responds to its competition.