There have been a number of updates that Facebook has been making over the past couple of days. Today there are a few changes in addition to the updated header. The first change is the addition of the <Fb:captcha&rt; tag for applications. This makes it easy for applications to protect against spam. It’s curious that Facebook has added captcha considering that they were supposed to have done the job of verifying users. One reason could be the opening of Facebook application pages to search engineThanks to Jesse Stay for pointing this out to me.

There are also a number of other changes that are taking place. Jared Morgenstern has posted on the Facebook blog about the upcoming changes. Many of the changes are small changes. Orli Yakuel pointed out a few of these changes to me this afternoon. One change is shown in the picture below on Orli’s profile. When you click on the names of people in your mini-feeds, a pop-up box will now be displayed with that user’s information.

If you are friends with that person it will link directly to their profile. According to Jared there will be a number of other small changes that take place including “removing the word ‘Updated’ from News Feed stories that have new information to them.” According to the Facebook help page, they have also removed the “Gift of the Day” homepage box as well. This is significant news for Zach Allia, the creator of the Free Gifts application. Look for more free gifts to be given.

I’ll be sure to keep you updated about any other site changes taking place on Facebook!