One of the more interesting bits is the addition of Dashboards to better manage and stay on top of your Applications and Games. The applications menu itself will also move up to your left-hand sidebar from its current position, relegated to the bottom left-hand corner of the page in the navigation toolbar since last September's major redesign. In many ways it seems like Applications are about to see a renaissance in terms of prominence and better user management tools, including new settings to make the applications you use less spammy.
With new Dashboards for Applications and Games, you'll be able to more easily see at a glance which apps you're interacting with more, which games are currently in progress, and which app and game activity is most worth paying attention to. You'll also be able to bookmark your favorite apps on the home page. All this will be a boon to those of us who don't hesitate to add new applications at the drop of a hat but don't relish having to maintain and weed out older apps, or digging through long lists to find what we're looking for.
Notifications from applications will also undergo a sea change, with email becoming the new primary mode of interacting with and receiving notifications from applications. Facebook likens it to "signing up for or creating accounts on other web services, which is essentially what applications on Facebook are." You'll thus be able to take advantage of the features of email and use whatever folders and routing rules you like to help manage communications from those apps, as well as easily unsubscribe from any noisy or unwanted apps.
New application spam controls will also help cut down on the noise from various games and apps. Instead of being overwhelmed by a river of notifications, requests and invitations from apps that may take action on your behalf, you'll be able to limit what you see in your News Feed to app notifications explicitly sent by your friends.
Renewed Focus on Applications
All in all a big chunk of the new roadmap is tantamount to a renewed focus on the applications platform and making the experience more useful and less noisy for users. Facebook is responding to one of the most frequent user requests, which is gaining more control over the News Feed and getting finer-grained tools to avoid information overload.
Also notice that Facebook is learning to prep its users far in advance of actual interface changes, perhaps having picked up a lesson in that regard from the pattern of user revolts that typically accompany its redesigns.