The new Facebook Pages include many of the same elements that individual users have: They include a large cover photo, a smaller profile photo and apps with photos, videos and places. It also gives brands and organizations to “pin” posts, which will hold them at the top of the Page timeline for seven days, and to “star” them, which will make photos and videos available in a double-wide format. Organizations can also set milestones, such as when they were founded or when they reached a certain number of users or likes.

In revamping Pages, Facebook has also attempted to make them more social, by enabling users to see which friends have liked an organization’s Page, or have mentioned the organization lately. The idea is to give users more social context for the Pages they’re visiting and friends who might share common interests.

More important than the visual elements of the new Facebook Pages might be the admin tools that are available behind the scenes. Administrators will be able to receive notifications of users interacting with their Pages and mentioning organizations publicly. They will also be able to respond to message sent from users who wish to contact the owner of the Page.

The evolution of Facebook Pages follows the introduction of user Timelines, which were announced at the company’s F8 developers conference last September and rolled out to all users earlier this year. One goal behind the updated Pages interface is to create a more consistent look-and-feel across the site,  Sam Lessin, Facebook product manager, said at a press briefing Tuesday.

It’s more than just consistency, though: Lessin said the new design of Facebook Pages would give brands and organizations more flexibility to tell their own stories. “The important thing about Timeline is that it wasn’t supposed to be just about people,” Lessin said. “Organizations have identities, too… This is a framework for giving [organizations] the power to tell and shape a story.”

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When entrepreneur Jason Calacanis shut down his blog in 2008 and replaced it with a subscription-only email newsletter, his move seemed to be more of a personal response to abusive reader comments rather than a leading indicator of a trend (although software guru Joel Spolsky also shut down his blog earlier this year). But now others have joined the blog exodus: Sam Lessin, the founder of streaming-media startup Drop.io, recently announced he was shutting down his blog and starting a subscription newsletter — one that charges readers a monthly fee. And since he is also an entrepreneur, he started his own subscription-newsletter service too, which is called Letter.ly. On the Drop.io blog, Lessin said that he started blogging in 2008 with a defined set of goals, including:

• Understanding the medium: “I strongly believed that it was an important medium to understand and that the only way I would really ‘get’ it would be to make a serious commitment to it.”
• Protecting online identity: “I personally found that if you don’t own your own identity, others are more than happy to hijack it and use it for their own ends.”
• Intellectual rigor: “I was letting myself get a bit lazy/sloppy in my thinking and I thought that forcing myself to take a public position would force me to hone my positions.”
• Being taken seriously: “I thought that there was ‘margin’ in the medium… meaning, more people that I cared about read and took blogs seriously per-unit of work/input.”

The Drop.io founder said that after two years, he felt that he had achieved all of his goals, but added that he felt writing a public blog that was available for free to readers was “exceedingly disingenuous if not straight hypocritical given my strong belief in the value of information” (Letter.ly is designed to allow newsletter writers to set their own price for subscriptions, and the Drop.io founder’s blog is $1.99 a month). Lessin also mentioned a factor that others argue has contributed to a decline in blogging — namely, the rise of Twitter and Facebook and other social tools that are easier to use and require a smaller investment of time, or what Lessin calls “passive and active data-streams.”

Since setting up Letter.ly, Lessin has been joined by several other bloggers, including Nate Westheimer — co-founder of video-indexing startup AnyClip — who says he plans to continue blogging but will share in-depth startup tips and other thoughts through his premium newsletter. Aviary.com co-founder Michael Galpert has also started a newsletter through Letter.ly. And Jason Baptiste, co-founder of several startups including Cloudomatic, argues that while they may seem somewhat stale and old-fashioned, email newsletters can still be a good business (although Lessin charges for his newsletter, Jason Calacanis’s version is free, but subscription is limited).

Not everyone agrees that moving from a blog to a subscription newsletter is a good move, however, particularly for startups and entrepreneurs — since sharing your ideas with a broader audience can have its own value, especially when you aren’t well-known. Former investment banker-turned-entrepreneur Steve Cheney recently described how he asked Hunch co-founder and angel investor Chris Dixon for advice on what he should do to raise his profile, and Dixon responded: “Start a blog.” It’s worth noting that .

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Boetter