Inside Facebook

Facebook has been showing off screenshots, running tests, and otherwise telling developers to watch out for big new changes to the home page UI and other aspects of the developer platform in recent weeks. Following a line of other moves described in a roadmap last november, user email addresses came last week. Now another big piece is starting to appear — the applications and games dashboards.

Available in application programming interface (API) form for developers since last week, one view of the the dashboards are live some users now, including us. You can see the pages by clicking in the soon-to-disappear bottom toolbar, on the Applications button on the far left-hand side. And try these URLs for yourself: here and here.

At some point soon — Facebook isn’t saying exactly when — the bottom toolbar will disappear completely and  be replaced on the left-hand side of the home page. The notifications counter on the right-hand side of the toolbar will be removed and counters will appear on application bookmarks.

The new dashboard will, similar to what you see here, make games separate from the other apps in recognition of their popularity. It will show users apps or games they’ve played before at the top, their friends’ recent activity, then ones that their friends have previously installed. The bottom of each page has a full directory. Notably, the game directory contains a subgenre of types of games, as seen in previous screenshots.