Another Facebook profile change, another group of disgruntled change-resistant people, who’ll have forgotten all about it this time next week.

This time, Facebook has introduced a new Facebook profile page to give more information on the at the top of your profile page. Visitors to your profile will see your basic details (relationships, location, job, education history etc), a snapshop of your recent photos and a couple of side bars filled with your shared photos, mutual friends and your friends and family.

The whole layout of the profile pages is in keeping with the sleek new look of the rest of the site, in particular the newsfeed.

So, why the change?

The change appears to be more in the layout, rather than the actual content. For the most part, the content remains the same. Time will only tell what these new layouts are moving towards.

You can also add extra details to various sections. Projects can be added to jobs, while the Featured Friend function allows you to highlight certain friends. Which I guess might be useful if you’re 15 and want to tell everyone who your 56 BFFs are.

Security measures have changed, and for once they’re higher. For instance, those who own a business page will find it harder to reply to comments on the wall, unless the commenter originally has low privacy settings.

Every couple of months, someone, somewhere starts a Facebook meme that catches on like wildfire. The most recent example of this was the ‘NSPCC’ campaign.

This particular meme involved Facebook users changing their status to “Change your FB picture to a cartoon from your childhood. The goal is not to see a human face on FB until Monday (Dec 6th) Join the fight against child abuse & copy and paste to your status!” The result was a newsfeed filled with characters from Button Moon, Transformers and My Little Pony.

What was surprising about this meme is that it turned out to be nothing to do with the NSPCC at all. Despite this, the charity was forward thinking enough to release a statement saying how grateful they are for the increased publicity, donations and traffic to their site.

More Facebook memes

Another recent meme involved women changing their status to “I like it on the table/floor/bed etc.” It actually referred to where they like to leave their handbag, but the intrigue was used to tease men and apparently raise awareness of breast cancer.

So what makes these memes so popular? The cynic in me would suggest it’s mainly about keeping up with friends and, with the innuendo-based memes, gathering a bit of attention. It’s a shame more of the memes don’t hold more useful information, like symptoms for cancer charities or links to donate.

However, whether their charitable intentions are pure or not, it seems like some of the campaigns were successful. In the US, the campaign focused on Childhelp instead of the NSPCC, and the charity reported a sharp increase in traffic (tripling to 10,000 hits on Saturday and Sunday.) Another charity, The Child Abuse Prevention Association, reported an increase in donations. And the NSPCC has reported an unprecedented rise in donations and site traffic.

Whatever the reason for the memes, it’s nice to see them having some form of positive effect.

Google announced a new web store based on Chrome last week, which could shake things up considerably in the browser market.

The new web store means Chrome users can add web apps within the browser, for easy access. The range of apps is extensive, and possibly the most exciting addition is a web app for Tweetdeck. With Hootsuite charging for the advanced features of their product, the (currently) free version of Tweetdeck will prove tempting for those that want to use multiple accounts on a web-based application.

Other highlights include Springpad, which acts as a sort of Evernote-type app, and Read Later Fast, which we should see integrated with ReadItLater, Instapaper, Evernote, Delicious, Dropbox, Google and a few others in the next couple of months.

Like Apple’s iTunes, there is a selection of paid apps to choose from. At the moment it’s mainly games, but no doubt some of the social applications will take on paid options after a certain period of time. Whether users will pay up is another question.

It’s certainly made me — a hardened Firefox addict — reconsider my browser options. The fact that it offers the same apps that I currently use as addons for Firefox makes the decision a little easier. The layout of the apps store is more attractive too.

Would you switch to Chrome or are you sticking with Firefox (or Explorer?)

In our conversation with Don Tapscott last week as part of The Social Media Leadership Forum -  run by ItsOpen (www.itsopen.co.uk) – he highlighted five key principles for the age of networked intelligence that he explores in his new book, Macrowikinomics: rebooting business and the world.

The five key principles are:

1) Collaboration

2) Openness

3) Sharing

4) Integrity

5) Interdependence

Tapscott argued that the Internet is reweaving the fabric of society, as millions of people connect and collaborate around shared interests.

For better or worse, he said, this ‘new fabric of connectivity’ is leading to deep change in our institutions.

There is no guarantee that the changes unleased by this social connectivity will always lead to good.

But Tapscott argues that organisations who are guided by the principles of wikinomics, can harness this new force and spur social and economic innovations that will alter society for the better.

It will be an insightful exercise over the coming weeks and months to start to apply these principles to organisations  who are in the news, to see if they are following the principles of wikinomics or not.