Facebook on Friday dropped a bomb on its user base by launching changes to its homepage, which immediately treats its 300 million users to a real-time “News Feed” interface when they log into the social networking site. The new “News Feed” format, resembling a semi-chaotic chronological Twitter-like interface, features friends’ updates with a “top stories” feel by showcasing what it deems as the most important, entertaining and interesting posts of the day. The News Feed format parallels the original Live Feed homepage interface, on which Facebook users could view a chronological list of their friends’ status updates and postings.

One small misstep in many users’ eyes — Facebook essentially picks what it thinks your top stories are going to be based on a variety of factors, including how many friends have liked and commented on the displayed posts, and how likely it thinks you will be to comment and interact with the Facebook contact. This of course is based on a metric that is not entirely understood by its user base.

Consequently, what is designated an improvement, however, often results in friends’ Facebook posts being accessible one minute and hidden the next, without a discernible reason why. The social networking giant justifies its move by saying that users will basically have the best of both worlds — they’ll be able to have access to the most interesting highlights from days past as well as the most current posts — just perhaps not exactly when they want.

“You will be able to catch up on what you may have missed while you were away from Facebook and then easily switch to the real-time stream when you want to see posts as soon as they’re shared,” said Facebook’s Raylene Yung in a company blog post Friday.

Facebook has yet again made substantial changes to its much maligned home page without warning resulting in an expected backlash. The social networking website boasting of over 300 million users has been in the past too known for its fixation with sudden home page changes, which receive lots of attention thanks to the sheer number of Facebook users out there.

In an attempt to focus on real-time events in a more resolute manner than ever, Facebook, over the weekend, has ushered in some refreshing changes to its homepage, incorporating new tabs for news feeds as well as events happening around the globe.

Under the new changes, the social networking website has done away with the “Highlights” section, and instead created new tabs, namely the “News feed” tab and the “Live Feed” tab, to allow its millions of users to get abreast with the events going on around them. While the News feed tab includes all the necessary info that the website deemed necessary for the users, the live feed tab features everything that has been happening with the people added in the user’s friend list.

“News Feed picks stories that we think you’ll enjoy based on a variety of factors including how many friends have liked and commented on it and how likely you are to interact with that story”, the website quoted in a blog post.

Today,CNN has invited a number of journalists to One Time Warner Center in New York City to witness a preview of the new CNN.com homepage (they’re calling the event “The Unveiling“). The site serves as one of the Internet’s most popular news sites and is also among the most trafficked sites overall, so a major redesign is no small undertaking.

Jim walton, President of CNN Worldwide, kicked off the presentation by talking about how the last time he had taken the stage, it was during CNN’s annual all-hands meeting in January, when he kept receiving questions about layoffs. He recounted that he had said “if we have significant layoffs, I will sit on this stage, and allow all of you to throw tomatoes at me.” going on to say that today, “nobody is going to be throwing tomatoes. He said that CNN had increased its profits year over year, and that it would be ending the year with more journalists than it started with.

Coinciding with the worldwide debut of Windows 7 and the launch of physical retail stores throughout the world, Microsoft has revamped its online store as well.

The news comes from Trevin Chow, Senior Lead Program Manager for Microsoft Store. Big surprise: the revamped online storefront features some new categories (including ‘Computers’!), so you can now go there to buy Windows 7 PCs as well as accessories and even third-party software like Adobe Photoshop and Nero 9.

HeyZap allows any website or blog to take the most exciting flash games and put them into their website. This results in the website/blog having increased traffic, user time of site and engagement. Publishers can use widgets, APIs or RSS feeds to connect up to over 12,000 games. Publishers can also make money from a revenue share scheme from our game that use Heyzap Payments.

Today HeyZap, the startup that helps Flash games get distribution and monetize effectively, is launching a new “Viral API” that helps developers integrate similar features into their own games.

Co-founder Jude Gomila says that up until now, developers have had to figure out how to implement these syndication features on their own — now they’ll be able to do it quickly using HeyZap’s APIs. To put the API to the test, HeyZap built a game called Balloon Boy Game (in honor of last week’s horror story-turned-scandal), which allows users to share the game with their friends via Facebook and Twitter.

We’ve all seen the brilliant functionality on Mashable where news stories and interesting articles can be shared to social networking sites; the functionality is driven by the images accompanying the articles; you click and hold on an image and can then drag it into a toolbar to share it. It’s brilliant and intuitive, and in this article I’m going to show you how we can replicate this behavior with jQuery and jQuery UI.

Nettuts+ is sharing a very nice tutorial (with source) that enables you to implement this feature using jQuery & jQuery UI. It makes use of the draggable & droppable components of jQuery UI to make drag’n dropping & targeting objects possible.

You can also enjoy the demo.

Wordpress recently launched themes that are optimized for mobile phone, so now mobile phone wordpress users can enjoy the blogging in an effective and optimized way. According to WordPress, there are more than 60 million page views that come from mobile phones per month for WordPress.com blogs. With that kind of traffic, how your site renders on mobile devices could be a big boon to increasing engagement.

That’s why we’re excited to learn that WordPress has just launched two new mobile themes for WordPress.com blogs that will be automatically displayed when a compatible mobile phone attempts to access your site. Given that the new mobile themes are default, you don’t have to do anything to see the new changes made to your WordPress.com blog. However, if you’d like to disable the mobile themes, you can do so from your Dashboard under Appearance -> Extras. While we think the news is great for hosted WordPress blog owners, we’re slightly disappointed that the mobile themes aren’t available for those of us who have self-hosted WordPress blogs.

jQuery, being one of the most popular & powerful JavaScript frameworks around, is offering a slick experience to users at every level.

Its website is a huge resource of documentation, examples & tutorials for anyone who is into it.

Besides the documentation jQuery offers, following other jQuery users is a great way to learn more & get inspired to discover new ways for taking advantage of this library.

Here are 15+ blogs to follow for jQuery fans that frequently create jQuery-oriented content:

John Resig

Not only for jQuery users but for anyone into JavaScript, his blog is a great source of information & inspiration.