It's a sponsored birthday!

In tandem with its redesign this week, Facebook made a number of changes to its ad program, according to All Facebook:

Social Ads will no longer be used to display advertisements on Facebook's homepage.

Ad positions on the right-hand side of the page will be sold by the Facebook Ads direct sales team. Three variants are available: two Social Ads will run at once (previously, a user was exposed to just one at a time); or one Facebook ad and one industry-standard banner ad will run in tangent; or pure banner ads will appear without Social Ad inclusion.

Newsfeed SocialAds are now sold exclusively through the direct sales team, enabling Facebook to better control the prices of newsfeed advertisements. "Additionally, it means one less advertisement location for those that integrate Social Ads campaigns with branded pages," All Facebook pointed out.

Ad space is now available on applications pages. Sizes include the traditional Facebook flyers, as well as 300×250 and 300×600 banner ads — purportedly the best-performing ad unit on the web.

Finally, Facebook launched a program called "Great Apps," which rewards developers that "[demonstrate] commitment to compliance with Platform policies" with higher visibility.

Last month MySpace released Phase I of its own redesign. The company heavily promoted the ad-friendliness of its new appearance, and it appears to have worked: Batman film The Dark Knight purchased all ad space for the redesign's debut date. Shortly thereafter, MySpace toted a new ad partner: Cartier.