ReadWriteWeb

Despite the Google Plus announcements and the passionate responses to Facebook's f8 conference, the biggest story to hit ReadWriteWeb this week was that Wadah Khanfar, the director of Al Jazeera, had announced his resignation after Wikileaks released documents that alleged he censored coverage under American pressure.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key trends that are shaping the Web - Location, The Real-Time Web and App Stores - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

This morning Facebook sent out invites to f8, its annual developer conference. The conference will be held at The Design Center in San Francisco on Sept. 22. Registration for the event is $400 and Facebook will not offer discounts (outside of press passes).

The keynote for f8 2011 will be held at 10:00 a.m. PDT with breakout sessions starting at 12:30 p.m. A post-conference event, After8, will be held at 8:00 p.m. In years past, Facebook has used f8 for major announcements and to set its agenda for the next year. This year, f8 comes a bit later than usual, with the annual conference coming in the fall as opposed to the spring. Are you attending f*8? What are your expectations for what could be announced this year?

It's been almost two weeks since Facebook's F8 developer conference, and we're still talking about the social networking site's announcements and the repercussions for the Web. While users' privacy concerns continue to dominate much of the discussion, many developers and entrepreneurs are seizing the opportunity to not only access the wealth of data that Facebook's Open Graph promises but to serve the needs of the site's disaffected users.

Facebook users who choose not to link their user accounts to Facebook's public Pages are ending up with blank profiles containing no information at all. If you haven't experienced this problem, it's probably thanks to the somewhat high-pressure tactics Facebook is using to get you to accept these changes.

The next time you visit your Profile page (if you haven't done so already), you'll be introduced to the new "Connected Profiles" option, one of the many potentially concerning privacy-related changes announced at Facebook's f8 developer conference last week. With this option, the text in your Facebook profile section where you list your hometown, education, work and interests, is now being linked to the respective pages on Facebook. So for example, if you live in New York, that's linked directly to a page for New York. If your favorite TV show is "Lost," you'll be linked to that show's page, and so on.

Those who choose not to link, though, are informed via a Facebook pop-up box that their Profile page will be left empty.

At last week's F8 developers' conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled plans to offer "instant personalization" all over the Web - a way for websites to become instantly more social. Without even signing in, sites gain access to publicly available Facebook information like your name, profile picture, friend list and more, in order to personalize your experience on the site. At launch, only three partner sites are offering this feature: Microsoft's new Docs.com, Internet radio Pandora and user review site Yelp. You can opt-out of this experience if you like, but by default, you're opted in.

Facebook just shook the tech world by announcing several major initiatives that collectively constitute an aggressive move to weave the social net on top of the existing Web.The rumors were that the leading social network would launch a "Like" button for the entire Web. Instead, Zuckerberg & Co. unveiled a bold and visionary new platform that cannot be ignored.

The bits of this platform bring together the visions of a social, personalized and semantic Web that have been discussed since del.icio.us pioneered Web 2.0 back in 2004. Facebook's vision is both minimalistic and encompassing - but its ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web.

It's been a given for some time that businesses, including startups, should have a presence on and connection with Facebook. With over 400 million active users, chances are your potential investors and customers are already there.

Fan pages have been a simple way to generate interest and engage customers, and Facebook Connect has quickly become a standard in signing up and signing in users. In his keynote at f8 yesterday Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg actually mentioned startups in his opening remarks, stating that they "are requiring that their users use Facebook Connect. We want to make it simple to create these personalized experiences."

Given Mark Zuckerberg's announcements at the Facebook F8 conference, one thing is certain: newspapers can no longer ignore Facebook's impact and reach. Whereas publishers continue to scapegoat Google for many of their current troubles, they should be equally, if not more, wary of Facebook.

Whether they acknowledge it or not, newspapers are losing out to the social networking site on the fundamental fronts of community relevance, attention and information dissemination. Yet behind the perceived threat from Facebook, there is also a new opportunity for publications to achieve newfound audience relevance.

One of the many announcements at Facebook's f8 conference today included an expansion of the Facebook Credits program, the social network's official virtual currency. Expansion of the Credits program could have a huge impact on how and how much revenue Facebook applications will generate.

Already in beta testing with over 100 applications, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Credits would soon role out to the whole network. Credits allows users to purchase virtual currency through Facebook that can be used to purchase virtual goods across multiple applications.

At its annual F8 conference today, Facebook announced its new Facebook for Web Sites platform. Besides the new Graph API and all the plugins and new features Facebook developed on top of this, the company will also offer a new version of its Facebook Insights analytics service. Currently, Insights provides users data about their Facebook fan pages and social ads. Now, however, Facebook is taking this a step further and will also give users who implement Facebook's new features on their sites data about the people who share content from these sites, "no matter where those shares originated."