Facebook continues to evolve, and amaze.  You’ve probably seen the stats: worldwide use has now grown to more than 350 million users. People are on it for an average of 55 minutes daily. In the last week, two of my Just 4 Men using grey-haired pals have joined and their opening salvo was that they swore they’d never join a social network.

When virtual worlds like Second Life were capturing the fascination of some, pundits forecasted we’d be living our lives in them. But while that faded, the reality has become that in a self-informatory sense, many literally now live inside of Facebook.

It’s not just the chatting, ranting, IMing, games, meeting future spouses, or read targeted ads about “Hot Asian Singles In Your Area” that’s interested me.

What I find fascinating is that we’re beginning to use Facebook as our primary source for news.

Consider that more than 86 percent of our loitering in Facebook is spent meandering through the Feed section, clicking on links people are posting. We’re checking out what friends are up to and slowly moving down the list.

But then we see a Facebook friend – we’ll call him Dan — who posts, “Really interesting piece on the plight of primate yoga instructors” with a link. You and Dan both love monkeys, of course, so you click and read all about it.

Forget going to CNN.com. You do that a few times with varying friends and it’s back to work or time to go pick up the kids.

For companies and brands, the landscape is changing dramatically. And it’s something that again will make and landscape even more about people than the brands that have tried to leverage Facebook’s connectivity to the consumer.

We’ve seen that many companies now have Facebook Fan Pages. Most don’t know why they are doing it. They figure their competition is there, so they should be too. That, or their PR or ad agency, which understands the implications even less, suggested a “Facebook strategy” (which is hilarious in and of itself).

Until now, the unwitting value for brands or companies on Facebook has had nothing to do with the Page itself, but in getting in people’s Feeds. If the brand can get into consumers’ Feeds, it gains a direct channel to a consumer to broadcast a message that hopefully will create interest. And as Brenna Hanley notes on The Next Generation, if a company wants to reach, say, millennials, they’d better provide some incentives worth paying attention to (a pet monkey would really work for me).  All this just to  drive the consumer either back to the Page or another online portal. That’s the Facebook value proposition for most companies.

Now, however, Facebook has changed the rules in a development that will take hold any day now, as getting a company’s message into its fans’ Feeds is no longer a right but a privilege that will be earned by publishing content that a company’s fans must react to.

In the past, all updated content from a Fan page appeared in Feeds section of anyone who was a fan of your brand’s page.  Content will now be surfaced based on a Facebook algorithm that takes into account how people are engaging with the company’s content that it publishes. The more people visit the Page and the more they comment on, and like, the content, the more Facebook will insert your updates into their feeds.

So as it was designed, Facebook is once again going to become even more about the people who use it, and less about the companies struggling to understand its value.

What’s the next big thing to happen in the Facebook world? Who knows, but I’m sure I’ll read about it in someone’s Feed.

Carry on.