Facebook is transitioning to a new face as it introduces 'Timeline.'

In an overhaul of the profile page, Facebook has introduced "Timeline," which comes in a fancy magazine layout, serving as a practical map of a user's life, organized by each year the user has been on Facebook. It arranges past photos and other information into a layout that has never been seen before on Facebook.

At its annual f8 developers' conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg also showed off the social network's new integration with Spotify, Hulu and Netflix, saying media companies have partnered with Facebook to reinvent the industry.

Facebook is also becoming an official news source, as The Washington Post Co. unveiled its Social Reader, which allows users to get stories from the newspaper within Facebook.

With the media integration, users can watch videos from the Facebook site, and friends can see what users are watching, with additional information on viewing statistics.

However, Netflix services will not immediately be available in the United States due to privacy laws that are currently being reviewed by Congress.

Until Timeline, and the upcoming apps that take advantage of Timeline, this sort of "open graph" sharing was not possible on Facebook, Zuckerberg said.

"We believe that eventually all apps that you use will be social," he said. "Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected, and the way that we do this is to map out all of the things that you're connected to."

Observers are quick to conclude that Facebook's central motivation for all the changes is advertising.

"With Facebook now able to collect more data in terms of what people are watching, reading, running, doing, that's more metadata which is now going to feed into what brands and marketers target," Hussein Fazal, the CEO of AdParlor told Reuters.

AdParlor runs Facebook advertising campaigns for companies including Groupon.

"You're going to get more relevant advertising to the users, you're going to get higher click-through rates," said Fazal. "In the end that means more revenue and more ad dollars going to Facebook," he said.

The social network, which generated $1.6 billion in revenue in the first six months of 2011 according to a Reuters source, is expected by investors to make formal announcements on an initial public stock offering in 2012.