Every time Facebook changes anything, people complain. Most of the time just because something has changed, without knowing actually what changed.

The october layout change for example isn't too big in fact. As far as I can tell it's not much more than turning the "hot" items that were in the right sidebar into a special tab (and breaking the refresh for the live feed, but I guess they'll fix that soon). The "live" tab is basically all information (see below for getting rid of certain restrictions); the "News" tab tries to reduce this amount of information by only showing you certain posts Facebook magic considers to be "important". If you are a heavy user you will probably prefer the "Live" feed, if you are a casual Facebook user, go with the "News" feed to have less crap posts to read.

Still there are some things you should be aware of when you are a facebook user (not all of these are new):

• Privacy settings in Facebook. You really should have a look at them. Be aware that if you put them all to the maximum, it may be next to impossible for not-yet-friends to add you. So I recommend to leave the "search privacy setting" to "all" but only have it show your photo and the option to add you as friend. This is enough for people to be able to actually add you as friend. (Setting it to "Friend of a Friend" was not sufficient for me.)
• Friend lists. These are really useful when you use Facebook for promoting events. Make lists of regional and topic grouping, for example I have a "swing dancers in Munich" list. If you bother people with irrelevant invitations they'll just ignore or unfriend you!
• Friend lists can also be used as a privacy device. I have a friend list called "privacy" with only those I consider to be really close. Photo markers etc. are restricted to these friends.
• The "live" feed will not show all your friends. By default it is restricted to 250 friends. The "Options" button at the end of the live feed page will allow you to increase this setting to 5000 and allow you to check which friends activities facebook had been hiding from you. (And indeed some people were I wondered if they had stopped using facebook had just been hidden from the feed by facebook ...)
• I wrote a Greasemonkey script (Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension, but by now also available for many other browsers, apparently even IE) to move the filters from the left to the right column, expanding the main feed column. Much more senisble layout IMHO.
• Avoid using applications where possible, especially all those Quiz applications and games. Remember: you will give the application access to most of your data and most of your friends' data as well. So make sure you can trust that application! (See this Post by the American Civil Liberties Union for details)

Also you should never forget that all the data you put online is hard to get rid of again. Just don't put anything there you don't want everyone to know. Facebook can be really powerful when used right for example as promotion channel. But the way you should be using it is to first consider what you want people to have an impression of you, then try to present yourself this way. Don't just throw everything that comes to your mind there. (This even more applies to blogs and web sites, obviously, that don't have any privacy control)