While the world stops to admire the big events and changes of 2013, the Facebook landscape is worth a look as well. Surprisingly, quite a lot has changed.

If you haven't been paying attention, or you want to make sure you know how to use all the new tools (or set your privacy settings properly to align with them), read on.

Graph Search is probably the biggest thing to hit Facebook in the past year or so. It was unveiled before 2013 started, but only rolled out properly to most people in the new year. It has fundamentally changed how we search on Facebook and what sorts of results we find.

Facebook makes recommendations for Graph Searches when you begin typing in the search field, so you don't even have to understand it in order to make good use of it. However, if you want to know more, read about the most useful Facebook Graph Searches you can perform, some crazy cool searches to try out, and how to set your privacy settings to decide what people see of you in Graph Search results.

Teenage Accounts Got More Public

Another way Facebook made people more public was in changes to teenager accounts. Most importantly, teenagers can now choose to make public posts and to have followers. This is not recommended for most teenagers, however, it can have some uses for celebrity teens and teenagers trying to fundraise or raise awareness for a cause.

Everyone Became More Searchable

Facebook decided to make everyone searchable via Facebook Graph Search. Do you see a theme here?

Facebook Makes Updates & Comments Better

After many years of deleted updates due to stupid typos, Facebook has finally decided to let us edit our posts. I can't say this is monumental, but it certainly makes life easier.

Another important change was the addition of nested comments, which finally made long comment threads easier to navigate and read through.

facebook comments

Autoplay Videos (& Adverts!)

A very recent move by Facebook was to automatically play video in your home feed, thankfully without sound. We speculated on how long it would take before video adverts were released, with the announcement coming just the following week. No surprises there.

Shared Photo Albums

Facebook finally realised that photos and sharing of information were a key part of what makes Facebook worth visiting, and came up with shared photo albums. Now, when you go to a big event, you and all of your friends can upload photos to the same album, meaning they are all collected together and viewable by all of your friends of friends. The result is a much more popular album with better coverage of the event.

Facebook Came To Windows 8

Nancy noted in her article on important events that changed social media that both Facebook and Twitter have decided to focus on mobile apps, rather than desktop and web access. However, it can't be denied that Facebook's official entry to the Windows 8 ecosystem was a huge step. For starters, Windows 8 looks a lot more appealing to many people now.

You Can Now Hold Facebook Contests Easily

If you're running a Page on Facebook, you've probably thought about holding a competition at some point. Previously the rules were pretty strict and forced people to collect information outside of Facebook.  These have relaxed quite a lot in 2013. You no longer need to have coding expertise and a database of email addresses to run a competition. You can run it all within Facebook.

Facebook Shadow Profiles

The dark side of Facebook was also revealed in 2013 with Shadow Profiles being proved to exist. Yes, Facebook has collected a lot of information about you and your friends whether you approve of it or not. Scary.

What do you think were the big changes in Facebook in the past year?