Thursday was a big day for Facebook, with plenty of changes being announced at the f8 conference. The reactions are mixed, with some people saying that they are “blown away” by the new design, while other complaining that it makes the site far more corporate and less social. As one PR professional tweeted, “Facebook users can now tie brands to experiences. I like that.” Yes, he does, but other people do not want their memories and life experiences turned into venues for corporate sponsorship.

As media analyst Douglas Rushkoff wrote in a piece on CNN yesterday, “We are not Facebook’s customers at all. The boardroom discussions at Facebook are not about how to help little Johnny make more and better friendships online; they are about how Facebook can monetize Johnny’s ‘social graph.’” Chances are most people don’t want their social graphs on Facebook monetized. As one local politician tweeted, Facebook should “change the name of the new Timeline feature that they’re rolling out to Autostalker.”

Facebook also announced a series of partnerships with music and video streaming companies, including Netflix and Rhapsody. Not only will users be able to stream music and videos via Facebook. They will also be sharing with their friends what they are watching or listening to. When a friend starts listening to a new song, an update of that ever-vital information will appear on the new Ticker feature. And if said friend is sitting alone at home with the curtains drawn and the earphones on listening to a favorite Justin Bieber track repeatedly because that is said friend’s guilty pleasure, that information will be related to all of his (rapidly dwindling number of) friends. In fact, this has actually happened already. Thanks to this new “service,” Zuckerberg discovered that his CTO Bret Taylor has a certain unexplainable fondness for Kenny G.  “Bret, we might have to talk about that after f8,” he said.

Similarly, friends will be able to follow the news stories that users read from a wide range of sources, from the Washington Post to the Gawker. Again, guilty pleasures beware, especially if you are secretly passionate about what celebrities wore on the red carpet of the latest award show.

Perhaps more worrying however, is the idea that the amount of information shared under the new Ticker system can rapidly turn into spam. “Will the new Facebook ticker become just a noise machine?” asks PC Magazine.  In fact, the only people to benefit from the information will be the marketers Rushkoff warned us about.